Trust Agent
In a digital age, the marketplace has become more niche oriented. The threshold of entering a particular market as business owners has lowered dramatically. As a result, the world has become even flatter but more competitive in the same time. So what is your solution to propel your business to the next level? What is the key to success? Developing good relationships is certainly a must. And trusts are needed for good relationships to take shape. This article is not precisely about how to establish relationships. Instead, it analyzes the most important element in the relationship building process: how to become a trust agent? In order to examine this topic on a “micro” level, let’s take a look at the following 5 rules.
1. Transparency
Transparency builds trust at no cost. Period. What I mean by it is that we must share information for our target markets, from reviews to recommendations. Think of Amazon for a second. Do you trust Amazon? Of course you do. Why? Because Amazon not only matches your chosen products with other items you may express interests in, but it also offers hundreds of thousands of reviews on its site that are geared to help you make a purchasing decision. Does Amazon spend any money to hire additional employees to write those reviews? No. But it gains tremendous trust from you, doesn’t it? On the same token, Netflix implements the same strategy, and so do countless other Web 2.0 companies.
2. Crowdsourcing
What is the definition of “Crowdsourcing“? Simply put, it is about “trusting the wisdom of the crowd.” You may be surprised by how this process reciprocates itself. It is simply about developing a community where you let your users express their opinions and communicate openly with as less barriers as possible. Crowdsourcing is used to leverage mass collaboration made even more possible by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.
This “peer-production” behavior could lead to more trusts within whatever community you are striving to form. Even though you are an opinion leader, you still need testimonials from your community, right? ”Peer-production” created these Web 2.0 giants such as eBay, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Craigslist. It is continuously shaping an entrepreneur community that I am creating. By looking at the testimonials and event reviews, you will realize why “crowdsourcing” is an indispensable tool for anybody to become a trust agent.
3. Abundant Mentality
In scarce markets, the pies are always zero-sum. As a result, you must give your users an “either/or” answer every time you respond to their needs. In abundant markets, which is what technology has brought us, business leaders offer “both/and” choice customized especially to solve their customers’ needs. Even if you don’t have the infinite capacity to give it all, you should at least move toward the abundant mentality, not away from it. Because as we all know, if your users/customers don’t get what they want from your community, they will soon leave you.
4. The Communication Rule
Without communications, trusts are hard to establish. You wouldn’t trust the person who is selling watermelons on the street of China Town, would you? Technology has enabled us to cleverly deliver our messages to the community members without interrupting what they do. Not long ago, Facebook changed its “privacy setting” options for all its users. Instead of sending a Direct Message to every user, Mark Zuckerberg simply put up a message on the top of the screen so people can see it when they log in their Facebook accounts.
In order to develop trust, changes and new rules must be communicated on a timely and clever manner. Every time Twitter is down for maintenance, don’t they always put up a message in advance to inform its users?
5. The Power of Free
Freemium is one of the buzz words in 2009. And it will continue to be a trendy topic in this new decade. I figured out the power of free while organizing business events for a group located in NYC. If you look at this group’s past events, you will discover that the majority of those events were free. The reason is really twofold:
I. Encouraging potential users to try out our events who might otherwise have chosen not to participate;
II. Increasing the group popularity by promoting free events with valuable content. After all, isn’t that what Google’s model is based on?
Most importantly, by encouraging others to try out our events, we are reinforcing the role we play as a trust agent. Remember? The more often you interact with your users, the higher the potential of building an insurmountable trusting relationship with them.
What techniques do you implement to develops trusts with your users/customers? Let us know your comments below.
