May
Trust Me….Really!
May 2nd, 2007 by April Hartmeister
As I was dropping my cat off at the vet today to be put under anesthetic and have her teeth cleaned, I have to say I was nervous. Do I trust this vet? Do I trust these people will handle my little one with the care I would personally use?
Do I trust my own doctor? Luckily I can say yes, but, what about the people who change my oil in my car? Do I rightfully trust the people on the road to stop at lights when I cross? Who can I really trust?
We, as a people in America, seem to have interesting arenas for placing trust. We don’t measure high on the trustability factor with our government, but we do trust major airline pilots that work 4-5 days without sleep to fly us from one place to another, or surgeons who also have the same sleep habits to perform excellent with a hysterectomy or a triple bypass. Am I just paranoid?
What compels people to be motivated enough to take action on the internet?
Wikipedia describes trust like this: Trust is a relationship of reliance. A trusted party is presumed to seek to fulfill policies, ethical codes, law and their previous promises. Trust is a prediction of reliance on an action, based on what a party knows about the other party.
This description would then make it difficult to actually create trust online…however,
Mark McElhaw - wrote an interesting article on how to create online trust
As a consumer, I don’t necessarily agree with the all web 2.0 tactics, as I really don’t want to give my email out to log in, and personally, I don’t want to provide it at all. However, it appears we have many internet marketers catching up and jumping on the band wagon for the Web 1.0 trust tactics, and others on the Web 2.0 ones….
Regardless, it appears that trust is a high motivator online in compelling consumers to take action on an item. Or not? I trust you know best.
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Hey April, Great Post. I need to spend more time looking at my pages and wondering if I would enter my personal information there if I just found them.
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Way to go April…
Here is the acronym I use.
(Note:Trust is something you have to maintain… notice if the T is missing it spells RUST..)
T is for Time which builds it.
R is for Relationship which furthers it.
U is for Upset when you breach it.
S is for Sale when your website emits it.
T is for Terrific when April blogs it!
Great Job!
May 4th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
April, I think you hit on a very important issue. And I agree with QuoteUS: we really need to put ourselves in others shoes when it comes to the trust issue. This is something I try to consider each time I write a landing page or article.
If consumers stick around long enough to actually read what Ive written, I can quickly lose their trust–and the “sale”–by writing something that might be considered too controversial or harsh, or by asking for information they dont feel comfortable providing. (And that would defeat my purpose of writing it in the first place.)
By objectively analyzing our own sites and content, I think we can make changes for the better to carry us forward.
Thanks for the post! Great information.