What is the Trust Economy?
Peter Brissette • October 5, 2016
A couple months ago I did a video called “What is Trust?” Trust is a major theme for us here at DMD Consulting. Today, I want to talk about the trust economy.
What is the trust economy? It has been popularized by a woman by the name of Rachel Botsman, who a few years ago wrote a book and did a TED talk. The title of her TED talk was “The Currency of the New Economy is Trust.” (The TedTalk video is at the end of this post if you want to check it out.)
What does she mean by that? The best way to explain this is to give you an example:
There’s a website called Airbnb.com. You’ve probably heard of it. On Airbnb.com, I can rent out a room in my house to a guest. Now, how does someone decide if they want to rent your room or someone’s room down the street? It’s really about the online reviews. What do the reviews of people who have stayed there before say? What have they said about you? What was the experience like? What was the relationship like to the person that owned the home? Airbnb is being popularized all over the world. Cities like Paris, San Francisco, New York, even places in Colorado.
There’re a few key aspects, I think, that are important about the trust economy.
First of all, that it’s driven by technology. The fact that we have this great technology now and we’re able to connect this way is really driving the whole trust economy.
Second, we realize is that the trust is contextual. What do I mean by that? What I mean is, just because I trust to rent a room from you on Airbnb doesn’t mean I trust you to put together a piece of furniture for me from IKEA.
Finally, learn that it’s based on collaborative consumption. Sites like Airbnb.com and companies like Uber, where I’m able to take my vehicle and able to consume the use of that vehicle with others. It’s a collaboration of consumption.
What do we learn from the trust economy?
It’s Not About the Technology:
A couple things that we learn from this, that it’s not just about the technology. The technology is just a tool that helps people connect and build relationships. Ultimately, it’s still about building relationships. That will never change.
Reputation has Value:
We also learn that your reputation has value, real, strong, actual dollar and cents value.
Reputation is Online:
We also learn that your reputation shows up in many different places. One of those places is online reviews on third-party review sites. What is your reputation online? What does it look like?
It’s the whole reason why we developed Review Me Marketing, to help you be able to take control of your online reputation and to build it and grow it and protect it.
If you’re using Review Me Marketing, congratulations. You are taking charge of it.
If you’re not sure about it, or maybe you’re not getting the most out of it and you’re not getting the most out of your online reviews, then let’s have a conversation and come up with some strategies and ideas that help you build your online reviews and help you build the value of your reputation so that people will trust you faster and be willing to take the next step with you so your business will grow and you’ll grow your clients and your customers easier, faster, and better than before. Thank you.
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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