Trust is a funny thing on the web. It’s two-way, in that you (the consumer) trust another. But it’s also just you, because the “other” is just some files on a computer — you’re the only human, the only one who can trust or mistrust.

Word-of-mouth marketing makes a big deal about passion and authenticity as the key ingredients to trust. Not because they’re actually authentic or passionate, but because they’re effective. Here’s a representative sample:

Customers will follow waggles from new sources – blogs, reviews, personal recommendations, etc. The more emotional the subject, the more passionate and authentic the source (mavens, connectors, scout bees, etc.), the more visible the waggle. These people are part of the hive, directing others to the nectar.

But as the character Pitch says in Melville’s masterpiece The Confidence Man, resisting the con man’s come-hitherings — “I have confidence in distrust.” Understanding trust on the Internet is not as easy as trusting passionate bloggers, or mistrusting cold-hearted corporations. People trust different people (or non-humans) in different situations:

A research study from Microsoft (October 2003, but entirely relevant) looks at whom Americans will trust. Two illustrations suffice. The first, entitled “Social aspect” shows who people will share information with (farther from “me” means less likely to share info):

The second illustration, “Emotional aspect” shows what information people will share (farther from “me” means more likely to share).

Taken together, these two graphs show that among the very hardest things to get a person to do (apart from sharing her spouse with the television) is to share his financial information over the Internet. In other words, to buy something on a web site.

It’s obviously not scary enough to prevent consumers from spending $143 billion online, but nonetheless there’s a big difference between signing up to a blogger’s RSS feed and buying that overpriced e-book she so passionately recommended on the blog. As an academic study on trust and Internet buying puts it, “trust is an important issue when differentiating between online browsing behaviors and actually purchasing.”

So who wins when it actually comes to a purchase? Is it the dinky site recommended by the “influencer” blogger, or the cold heartless efficient e-commerce machine (with the secure server and the money-back return policy) from the major corporation?

Trust between people is different than trusting a “transaction” or an ecommerce engine. VeriSign’s new slogan “Security Sets You Free” is frighteningly Orwellian (”Arbeit macht frei” springs to mind), especially when we’re told that the freedom comes from its “Security Intelligence and Control Services^sm“.

I don’t think that’s what they meant over at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, but it might be exactly what you’re after when you type in your credit card number. Trusting a recommendation is one thing; trusting a merchant is another — they’re very different kinds of trust, and marketers should take care not to mix them up.

Thoughts appreciated…

Posted by Antony in: Blogs, Media + Marketing