A recent media survey, that Joachim and I talked about in an earlier post, puts some numbers to a strong trend. Here’s an excerpt:

“Television is the big loser in media trustworthiness with the rise of the Internet. When asked where they turn first for trustworthy information, 29% of respondents in the U.S. still cite TV first, down from 39% three years ago. The Internet is now cited by 19%, up from 10% in 2003. The same trend is evident in the U.K., where television has declined from 42% to 33% as respondents’ first choice, while the Internet has risen from 5% to 15%.”

Why is (finally) television loosing ground, whereas Internet trustworthiness has doubled? I’d say because the web is a potentially much more powerful medium for building trustworthy institutions. Old-fashioned television just can’t compete. Seth Godin captures its dilemma as follows:

“News on television isn’t ‘true’. It can’t be. There’s too much to say, too many points of view, too many stories to cover. Television can never deliver all of the facts and every point of view. The best a television journalist can hope to do is combine the crowd-pleasing, ad-selling stories on fires and crime with the insightful but less popular stories on world events. And, we hope, to do it without an obvious bias.” [from All Marketers are Liars]

“The Internet” is a very heterogeneous medium in terms of what types of interactions or narratives it enables. Some of the most interesting projects in the Web 2.0 space aren’t very innovative from a technological standpoint. Indeed, they are first and foremost social innovations. They are movements that form new institutions with new organizing principles, many of which are concerned with solving social dilemmas. There’s an ongoing change as the web matures, with more and more sites becoming functional, trusted institutions. And that change, I believe, is what drives these numbers.

So, where are the newspapers? The same survey has this to say:

“Newspapers, which are often thought to be the most serious casualty of the Internet wave, show rankings essentially unchanged in most markets at approximately 20%. Newspapers remain the first trusted medium of choice for respondents in France, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Korea, and Italy.”

Why? Maybe because newspapers–as it stands today–are institutional forms with a future. As I see it, newspapers–although facing lots of challenges–have a much clearer migration path to renewing themselves and becoming part of the new media ecosystem. Newspapers, as institutions, seem to work well in symbiosis with The Long Tail of Blogs, and, for now, I see no signs of big change in that structure.

Yesterday Alex and I met up with Mike Micucci, CEO of TN20, a hot 7-person startup in the online community space. They’re working on a new service for existing special-interest groups in diverse areas such as child care and mountainbiking. One of the key elements of their business is to leverage the intrinsic trust already existing within these groups. “There’s a high level of trust in these communities, mainly due to the fact that they generally have some barrier to entry, and this trust leads to a much higher level of quality in the content being produced. We leverage the intrinsic trust that’s already in place, rather than trying to build it from scratch” says Mike.

In the past few months, Mike and his colleagues have been working on collaborative filtering and trust metrics algorithms for getting the most valuable and truthful information out of these communities. They’ve been working closely with several communities for a long time, continuously doing focus groups and prototype testing–often scrapping features and re-doing parts of the software after new input has been received.

“We’re just in the beginning” when it comes to understanding trust as it relates to building online forums, institutions, marketplaces or virtual spaces, says Mike, “The current systems need to be greatly improved”. He tells us about his recent experience with selling a car over the web. “On Craigslist, I had five scams out of seven replies”, he says, “I ended up selling over eBay although I had major problems there as well.

So according to Mike, even though eBay “works”, we have ways to go. Understanding how trust works, and how it can be built online, is key.

Eric and I are currently down at the disneyland of the tech world–Google. We are just about to check out a techtalk by Will Wright on Spore but I thought I’d post a few reflections that surfaced during yesterday’s meeting with Professor BJ Fogg and David Danielsson from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.

We were talking about establishing online trust when BJ had this interesting idea for a slightly unorthodox case study approach. Instead of trying to look at desirable mechanics of trust online (how trust can enhance the online experience) we could flip the whole concept around and learn about the same things by looking at the people who maliciously deal with establishing trust as a profession–I am, of course, talking about the predators.

Predators are probably the most well-educated in the mechanics of establishing trust online since their whole agenda deeply depends on it. Myspace predators constantly seek to establish trust as fast as possible and are sure to know the ins and outs of trust-enhancing social interaction within that system. To exploit a system, technical or social, you really have to know how to “work it”.

Now, what I have been thinking about is how to get in contact with serious predators and get insight into their tactics and views on their “work”. One idea I had after talking to Mike Micucci, CEO of TN20 and hearing about his problems concerning the scam-proposals put forward to him when selling his car on eBay would be to create an online potential victim. I could create a fake ad for an expensive car, add a made-up person to Myspace, enter a non-existing CEO on LinkedIn and then wait for scammers to contact me. Once contact has been established I could “come clean”, explain the research and try to start a conversation with the intention of getting their comments on trust. Am I being naive in thinking this might yield some results?

Yet, on the other hand, the whole idea of faking identities and ads makes me feel slightly uneasy. Is this an ethical way of finding interview subjects? Is it safe? Let me know what you think!

Just had a chat with Joachim Stein, a good friend of mine based in Berlin. Joachim is primarily working as a technical consultant for cultural institutions. In his remaining time he’s a conceptual artist making works which are “as de-materialized as possible”. Recently his interest is drawn towards MMORPG’s and mainly the economical side of these games.

The Supicious Nota Bene The interesting bits from our conversation can be listened to here [39 minutes, MP3]. We’re talking about trust, a recent media trustworthiness survey, the nature of online institutions, web 2.0 and economic history. Joachim also shares his experiences with Second Life, among other things telling a trust-related story involving virtual land, a “notary machine” and a Californian hippie.

NOTE: Joachim just confirmed that there is indeed some social networking functionality built into SL.

Last night I attended the monthly AttentionTrust meet-up and heard Tara state the five principles of Pinko marketing.

• Inbound rather than outbound messages (aka “listening” more than “talking”)
• Be a community advocate
• 100 % authenticity
• “Nichification”
• Adopting open source principles

For me, the discussion of these principles reflects an ongoing change in the world today. As supply is exploding we are finding more and more things to spend our attention on and thus the job of the marketer is changing.

One outcome of this is that the higher level of commitment suggested by the Pinko principles (from both the consumer and the company) reveals a situation of potentially increased trust. The increased trust would come as a welcoming to many companies that today face increasing consumer brand disloyalty. Today, due to abundant supply and with it low switching costs, loyalty must be sought by making the user want to remain loyal. In building community around a product the company is seeking to establishing stronger relationships with its customers. The trust in this relationship can create an emotional stickiness in an ethical way (i.e. not technical tie-ins) thus increasing consumer loyalty.

However, in these days when just about anybody seems to be promoting deeper relationships with almost anything and anyone, it’s worth pointing out that relationships (as opposed to single transactions) are not always beneficial. Just like the Swedish markets-as-networks perspective has stated since the early days of LG Mattson–relationships are extremely expensive both in time and attention. There comes a point where the energy of adding another weak-tie takes time/attention away from the existing stronger ties and by simple economics is not profitable for neither consumer nor company. So the value lies not in creating a big community with many relationships but rather in establishing and maintaining meaningful ones.

Ok, so let’s think. Relationships are expensive. Listening is expensive. Being niche means excluding and risk of revenue loss. Business models for companies adopting open-source principle are still hard to find but at the same time evolving into something highly exciting. Is this really economically viable?

Instinctively one assumes that the Pinko ideas suggest the marketed product becomes something of high-involvement, meaning high attention for both the customer and company. However, Ed Batista puts forward a great point related to AttentionTrust and the attention recorder. Listening is not necessarily about reading an email, taking a support call, meeting consumers. Listening is about any activity that helps you stay attune to what the users think, explicit or implicit. Through implicit customer feedback, such as site statistics, clicktrails, heatmaps etc. a company can learn much about what customers want without either party having to engage in an expensive traditional conversation. The trick is of course for the company to a) make sure that the customer agrees on “talking” in this manner (i.e. that the company is permitted to listen to the implicit cues) and b) understand what the user means by her implicit actions. By understanding the implicit cues a user gives, a company can engage in high-involvement relationships but with low-attention cost for both company and user.

So, the key to making Pinko marketing economically viable is in finding an appropriate listening strategy that makes the the barriers to speak low for the consumer and enables low attention costs for both consumer and company. But then, of course, unless you are also willing and agile enough to act upon what you are hearing–listening will never do you any good.