Summary: In this post, I discuss the issue of trying to force independent word-of-mouth recommendations, an oxymoronic concept. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a simple two-step process to generate great word of mouth: 1) provide a great product or service, and 2) make it easy for people to spread the word.

One of the big lessons from Facebook’s trials over the past three weeks is this:

Artificially-induced word of mouth is not the same as the organic kind.

Not only is it not the same, but attempts to game it, like Beacon, carry the potential to bite the implementers in the nether regions.

This concept goes straight to the core of what makes word of mouth powerful: its inherent sincerity. And it pretty much goes without saying—or it should—that sincerity can’t be faked.

The reason we trust our friends is because we believe they have no ulterior motives, so it means a lot when they buy something or subscribe to a new service or read a good book, and are independently impressed enough to pass on a recommendation.

I believe that we all choose what we want to do all the time—nobody has to do anything. But in our society, the concept of having to versus wanting to is frequently linked with money. If you do something without receiving any money, you’re not doing it because you have to, you’re doing it because you want to. The most powerful recommendation possible comes from someone who is so awed by your product or service that they have to tell people even though they get no financial benefit.

And the payment question can be tricky. On the one hand, are paid endorsements still independent? On the other hand, if you’re going to co-opt my purchasing habits and use them to promote your products I should get a piece of the pie, don’t you think?

There is a reason this is the most powerful recommendation, and it has to do with motive. If you’re not getting financial benefit, why do it? Why do we tell each other about commercial offerings when we have no stake in the sale?

When we take away the financial incentive, it comes down to social standing. If I consistently recommend the best products, the coolest services, the newest up-and-coming websites, I increase my social rank. If I recommend lousy things, those recommendations color people’s impression of me personally.

We all know this, albeit subconsciously. I know that my friend wouldn’t recommend to me something lame because it would make her look lame. And that’s far more important to her than the $10 she might earn from a company trying to buy her endorsement.

You cannot fake this stuff. You definitely cannot fake this stuff sustainably.

Tapping into word of mouth is a simple two-step process:

1. Provide a great product or service
2. Provide the tools and mechanisms to enable customers to easily recommend your product or service

What has your experience been with social recommendations and endorsements? And I’ll give a dollar to anyone who can provide the original source of the quotation: “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Summary: In this post, I review some of the ways that trust is earned online, including voting, feedback, human editors and inbound links. Why don’t we have mechanisms like these to measure the trustworthiness of companies?

Bruno Giussani published some notes recently from a conference in Amsterdam, including this comment from Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg:

There is a digital tidal wave that changes every walk of life, every business, every part of the society. The question of this session is: how can we tell who has authority in today’s world?

So far 100% of the people who’ve voted in yesterday’s poll prioritize trust over privacy.

Trust is critical. Authority is critical. But why do we need to trust companies? Here are a few thoughts:

• We have to trust that the companies we give our information to won’t ever make a mistake and accidentally release it to the public, such as my recent experience when Lingo gave me the email addresses of 14,000 customers.
• We have to trust that the companies we give our information to are not conducting activities in such a way as to expose them to subpoenas.
• We have to trust that the digital security mechanisms they have in place are sufficient to prevent malicious access.
• We have to trust that the company itself doesn’t have any malicious or undesired intent.

Those are pretty heavy burdens of proof for online companies, and most are highly difficult to prove—I mean, seriously, how many consumers have the faintest idea of the digital security mechanisms that Facebook does or doesn’t have in place?

The actual process is similar to voting for president. You can’t know in advance every issue that might come up during a presidency, so you decide if you trust the person as a whole based on your individual impressions. The hope is that you can count on someone to do the right thing even if you have no idea of the future circumstances that person will face.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if there were some way of measuring trust in companies? It shouldn’t be too hard.

Right now, we’ve got some decent, explicit methods for indicating the trustworthiness of sources:

• Votes: Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon use a voting system to try to get the cream to rise to the top.
• Feedback: eBay and their Kiwi counterpart TradeMe use a feedback rating system to increase buyer confidence.
• Human editors: Slashdot relies on a human-powered filtering process to ensure only good stories make it to the site.
• Inbound links: The lifeblood of Google and the bane of any new site-owner’s existence. Technorati also relies on these for its rankings.

Even though we all know that they can be gamed, these methods are still useful as an indicator of website or page quality. But there’s no such thing for companies, really; no standardized, democratized eBay-type rating system that allows users to share their experiences with each other.

Do you think such a thing would be useful to have? And what would be the best way to implement it—how should it work so that it doesn’t get gamed, either by consumers or by the company itself?

Ohmygoshthisissoinsanelyimportant…

The Semantic Web Stack from Tim Berners-Lee:

What’s at the top of the stack?

Aaron Wall on Search Engine Land talks about credibility as a crucial element of SEO:

Authority is not something you take, but something that is granted. Gaining authority makes it easier to gain more authority, and eventually it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

And then ruins it by saying:

In many instances appearing as though you are credible is more important than actually knowing what you are talking about, especially on a network that has no respect for copyright and where just about everything is freely available.

A whole industry is sprouting up to maintain people’s online image (so that their clients and constituents can continue to trust them).

Francis Fukuyama thinks it’s pretty important, if you go by his book ‘Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity‘. From the Library Journal’s review:

He argues that the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation’s prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms. In comparison with low-trust societies (China, France, Italy, Korea), which need to negotiate and often litigate rules and regulations, high-trust societies like those in Germany and Japan are able to develop innovative organizations and hold down the cost of doing business. Fukuyama argues that the United States, like Japan and Germany, has been a high-trust society historically but that this status has eroded in recent years.

Just so you don’t mistrust my words, you should know that I haven’t read that book; I found it via a piece Jakob Nielsen wrote waaaayyyyy back in 1999 (the web equivalent of the Pleistocene) on trustworthiness in web design. It does look like a good read, though.

‘Don’t be evil’ is a fantastic motto—as long as we trust them.

What are your thoughts on trust? How does your level of trust differ online from offline, if at all? Should trust, not relevance, be the holy grail for websites?