This Social Media Thing

Trust is a pretty basic currency. Without it an organisation can’t really function. Up until now the way most organisations have created trust, or reputation, is through carefully managed and restricted channels of communication. This has become an accepted way of doing things and the basic story here goes something like this, “not all of the people who might be interested in us as an organisation can actually come and directly interrogate us, try the product or service, see how it is made and meet the people who do it. We will therefore create a distilled summary of all of this which you can get by looking at our ads / website / reading our literature etc.”

This worked because it was efficient, from the organisations perspective and because individuals recognised that they couldn’t (or couldn’t be bothered), to comprehensively interrogate all the organisations they dealt with. They would accept the organisations “institutionalised representation” of itself (its brand) – provided they could have a level of reassurance that this representation was reasonably accurate. The one flaw in this model was that if anything caused people to doubt this representation, this would undermine the whole thing and cause them to lose trust. However, this could be mitigated against by the fact that, for example, one instance of poor customer service tended to live and die with the individual concerned and maybe the group of friends they discussed it with, and if it did come to greater prominence this tended to be through channels which could be controlled – either sidelined by effective PR or drowned-out by advertising.

In other words, the effectiveness of the model of institutionalised trust rested on two assumptions: people couldn’t easily interrogate all aspects of an organisations activities and behaviours nor could they easily publicise examples where the reality of corporate behaviour was found to be inconsistent with its institutionalised image.

Social media is undermining these assumptions. Now that the tools of mass publication are available to any it is possible to expose inconsistencies between claim and reality. Every customer is potentially an investigative journalist, equipped with sound and video recording equipment (i.e. a mobile phone). Forums are springing-up specifically to allow these experiences to be logged and promoted. And even if examples that highlight flaws in institutionalised trust don’t ‘go viral’ or get widespread promotion, neither do they lie dormant or fade away as they used to. Nothing, in the digital world, goes away or lies dormant. It gradually gets linked to other bits of information and pulled into the digital halo or stormcloud that is slowly building-up around organisations (and individuals) – their ‘digital identity’.

There is an often repeated phrase – Google is a reputation engine not a search engine, and Google never forgets. I prefer the shrewd observation made by Jeremiah Oywang that Google is the homepage of your corporate website. You therefore haven’t got to simply worry about getting your site to the top of the ranking – you have to worry about all the other things, that reference you, that surround or follow you on the list that are created by other people who have some form of interest in your organisation. But perhaps the most critical thing is that this new transparency does not demand that everyone takes the time to use these new tools to interrogate organisations – the power of the crowd comes into play. The fact that someone is taking the time to do this and you know it is happening and can interrogate the process if you wish is sufficient. As soon as sufficient numbers can be brought to bear a form of crowd intelligence can be generated very quickly – wikipedia being the classic example.

Dealing with this new transparency is difficult. It is just not viable or efficient to try and manage all of the new channels and potential points of interrogation that are now being created. The answer lies in recognising one of the fundamental truths of the shift from mass to social media: trust is shifting from institutions to processes. People won’t trust you purely on account of what you say that you do, they will trust you on account of what they see that you do.

There are two ways that organisations are currently coming to terms with this. First is through the creation of shared engagement spaces: online places where stakeholders can discuss an organisation, amongst themselves and also with the organisation itself. Probably the best known of this is Dell’s IdeaStorm but others, such as My Starbucks are springing up and also sites like GetSatisfaction are offering IdeaStorm type functionality for anyone who wants to use it. The second is through giving potential visibility on a much greater range of an organisation’s operations. Microsoft’s Channel 9 is the pioneer here. Some years ago Microsoft took the radical step of allowing a bunch of techies to wander round the company with a video camera encouraging people to talk about what they were doing. Much of the stuff they talked about was very techy and specific – but Microsoft recognised that, by its nature, this type of content has to be very niche and the idea is to produce as much of it as cheaply as possible. Not only did this initiative dramatically improve the efficiency of Microsoft’s relationship with the outside software development community – a key stakeholder – it was also instrumental in changing the corporate perception of the organisation at a time when its reputation was perceived as being remote and predatory.