Trust and the Social Network

Social networks are a challenge. They are a social construct made up of people and their interactions, running on technological platforms that are governed by algorithms. They are a conceptual space where the essence of what it means to be human interacts seamlessly with what a machine is designed to do best. Trust is as important in cyberspace as it is in the offline world we live in. Like most human qualities it can be broken down into distinct, measurable steps which allow it to acquire a calculable value. In this chapter we shall see that as the online and offline world merge trust and trustworthiness in one begins to translate into the same qualities in the other. We may not quite feel it ourselves but we are actually already living in cyberspace, our selves and activities already divided in corporeal and digital avatars, working with intent.         

We use tools to facilitate relationships. This is hardly news. The Victorians managed to do the equivalent of texting using the penny post (which they invented) to communicate on specific subjects, starting conversations that went on for months. They gave us, in the process, the epistolary novel which is an acknowledgment that any conversation has a beginning, middle and end punctuated by highs and lows. Their letters often became volumes of works that reflected the exploration of a subject, two questing minds, writing their thoughts to each other, building on each other’s ideas to seek a higher place of understanding.

One could not read The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Carlysle without feeling that they were eavesdropping in the mental processes of two great thinkers struggling with the role of language in literature and communications. The world has become smaller and more transparent because we strive to break out of our isolation, our brains seek to connect with others and in the connection we find both a sense of wonder and fulfilment.

The seeming cacophony of ‘LOLs’, cat-picture shares, memes being passed along and holiday pics being shared forms an ever increasingly dense backdrop of human-to-human communication taking place via social media platforms. With more and more powerful devices, extended points of access and more of us online, it seems that the more isolated we are the more connected we become.

 The importance of this becomes evident when we take into account a new Pew Research report titled “Teens, Technology, and Romantic Relationships” which shows that:

• For boys who were dating, 65% said social media made them more connected to a significant other while it was 52% for girls
• 50% of all teens surveyed, dating or not, said they had indicated interest by friending someone on Facebook or other social media and 47% expressed attraction by likes and comments
• Texting is king - 92% of teens who were dating said they texted a partner, assuming the partner would check in with "great regularity"

Technology is making many of the scary parts of that first connection between humans, easier and way less scary. Trust, in that context then begins to form gradually and get tested constantly not unlike it would have in our ideal scenario of a medieval village.

Social networks, unsurprisingly, are changing even the way we think about trust and this is where a fresh paradox arises. As in everything humans drive the connection. Our actions, interactions, posts, comments, shares, re-shares, +1s, Likes and thumb ups, become part of the human behavior that says something about that particular instant in time and the piece of content over which all this is happening. By association they also say something about ourselves, the content sharer and everyone else who may have engaged on that particular topic or thread. While all this is human, the activity we engage in is also visible to machines.

Algorithms look at individual user profiles, mine the connections between them, check for patterns, historical behavior, subject matter expertise, close or distant affiliation and then determine a trust score for the content, the person, the subject matter and everything associated with them. This, in turn, determines visibility, importance and relative trustworthiness.

Trust, in a social network environment, because of our interactions morphs from the ethereal, elusive quality of the early days of trust research into something more tangible, more concrete. A quality that has a numerical value and many small but visible moving parts, each of which signifies something to a machine that can read it, measure it and faithfully record it.

The opening paragraph from a team of University College London researchers, in England, states the challenge quite well:

“Using mobile devices, such as smart phones, people may create and distribute different types of digital content (e.g., photos, videos). One of the problems is that digital content, being easy to create and replicate, may likely swamp users rather than informing them. To avoid that, users may organize content producers that they know and trust in a web of trust. Users may then reason about this web of trust to form opinions about content producers with whom they have never interacted before. These opinions will then determine whether content is accepted. The process of forming opinions is called trust propagation.”  

The traditional approach of assigning a value of trust to a web resource according to a centralized global arbiter was something Google did with the visible part of PageRank on websites. The little green bar of a rating from 1 to ten was intended, primarily for website visitors looking for some way to determine the credibility of a website and it worked, for a while. The fact that Google gradually retired it in 2013 by not putting out any more updates is an indication of the fresh difficulties faced in a semantic web overseen by semantic search where the speed at which information is shared and the different ways it has of being repurposed are a challenge in themselves.

As a matter of fact in real life we often wrestle with the problem of personalized trust where two people who know each other well, have a different opinion about the trustworthiness of a third individual whom they both know. The solution proposed by researchers is a variation of the small-world phenomenon we discussed in chapter 1 of this section of the book. Its basis is fairly simple, if personalized trust is something that varies between two individuals and depends on the strength of their connection, if we could assess all individuals on a relative basis then those who are most trustworthy are known then most because more people quote them, believe in them, think about them and are influenced by them. This is a little like PageRank for people, determined by machines.

Indeed, the researchers wrote:

 “…on a graph in which: not links but nodes are either rated or unrated, and those nodes are then connected to each other if they are related (the techniques consider that two nodes are related if their ratings are similar). Informally, these techniques exploit knowledge already present in the graph (rated nodes) to construct a function that is capable of predicting unrated nodes.”

So, if George knows Tom and both believe that Nick is 100% trustworthy when Nick introduces Harry to the network Harry will enjoy a trust score (and a real perception of trust) even though he is totally unknown.

Influencer Marketing, Trust and Social Media

This is what brands and marketers look for, of course, when they tap into influencer marketing, seeking to take advantage of the power of established relationships of trust between a power user in a social network and his audience and gain acceptance and visibility.

That model worked well enough in the pre-social media world when banks would hire well-known actors to sell their brand in TV and magazine adverts, banking (as it were) on the popularity of the person they hired to personalize their brand and help it reach its audience.

The difference between then and now lies in connectivity. In that one-to-many way of communicating the message was fixed and the channel was top-down. In the transparency created by connectivity not only do we see the message and can challenged it but the response to the challenge is also visible and becomes part of the conversation. When the way something is done is as visible as what it is that was done, what surfaces in the transparency that results from it all, is a clearer understanding of values and motives. In other words, intent.

A brand that says still “Trust us, because of who we are” and leaves it at that, is unlikely to receive, in this environment, the welcome it hopes for.

Influencers can, then become, handy mediators. But does it work? It does because it is all about relationships. Even power users care about the connections they make in a social network setting, irrespective, of the large number of other users those connections may be with. Malcom Gladwell’s popular book The Tipping Point studies the way information flows are mediated by the networks of people and their associated trust relations:

“To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.”

We get down to the available amount of energy left to do anything with again. In chapter 2 of the second section of this book we saw just how trust allows us to function more cost-effectively by simplifying the world we live in and making our decision-making process easier.

In his book, Thinking, fast and slow American psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed how the incremental value assigned by people to transacting with a trusted party, affects people’s beliefs and decision making. This suggests that the moment we are in a social network setting we are already deeply engaged in its trust calculation mechanism, our very human actions and reactions, become seamlessly embedded in the algorithmic process that underpins the platform we are on.

Our Facebook interactions and engagement, for instance, begins to coalesce into nodes we call “family” and “friends”. Our engagement with or consumption of information, news, pictures, videos and memes becomes a vote of confidence towards people, companies and brands we trust. Suddenly, the online world we used to run to, to get away from reality and be irresponsible, is now every bit as important in the creation and propagation of trust as the offline world we are part of.

This makes us all responsible. Our online behavior, interactions, content consumption and content creation generate signals that affect the visibility of content and the popularity of other people and brands.

If you are running an online business the ingredients are simple: 

• Value – make sure your content creation strategy produces something that’s of use to most of your audience. This means that a mix of informational and practical posts are necessary. Aim for the core of your audience but don’t be afraid to expand the reach.
• Values – create context for what you curate and/or share. Explain why it’s important and show that what you do fits into a wider picture of activity that’s informed by a broader set of values that your audience can understand, identify with and get behind. These are gateways to conversation and engagement, they become the bridging points that allow greater consideration of what your business does.
• Tone – your business may be a small family based operator or a large global conglomerate. Unless you show that it has a human face and a human voice that can approach its audience at their level, on things that are important to them, it will fail to resonate sufficiently to capture their attention.
• Knowledge – whatever you may do, however you may do it, if you are doing it well it has its own exceptional wealth of knowledge to impart. Knowledge shared is a key that helps unlock the context of your content and help gain attention.

Relationships Matter

The automatic calculation of trust in social network settings is, of course, in the first instance a classic case of Knowledge Based Trust (KBT) which we examined in more detail in chapter 3 of the second section of this book. But it’s more than just that. While the algorithms use criteria such as, for instance, comment frequency and comment length, number of commenters on a thread, frequency of engagement between commenters, degree of interaction between commenters, domain expertise of commenters, network of friends of commenters, commenting history of each commenter in general, in an almost infinite degree of granularity, in order to establish the context, relevance and importance of a piece of content, what drives the initial interaction that sparks off all that activity is very much personal trust driven by more human traits: interests, relationships, passion, understanding, likes and dislikes.

The best piece of content in the world shared by someone whose avatar picture we dislike throws up a dissonance inside out heads that we find difficult to overcome. The most intelligent comment possible, dressed with four-letter expletives and pointed directly at us, will fail to find appreciative space inside our heads. The connections we make are still human after all. The systems we create are a hybrid of human and machine – a union intended to make a digital platform scale.

We have had scaling before. All the 20th century was devoted to the industrialization and scaling of processes that took a human activity, made it machine-reproducible and stripped the humanity out of it until we found ourselves living in a world where “trust” was a notion we paid lip service too. It put us on a slippery slope where we soon found ourselves paying lip service to other human notions too like “honesty”, “honor” and “respect”.

"Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence." Screamed Enron’s motto at us. Its mission statement spelled out that "We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves....We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don't belong here." - Yeah, right.

We saw in chapter two of the second section of this book that the moment respect is taken out of the equation trust fails to find foothold. We are, at the moment, facing a unique challenge: How do we make relationship marketing that’s best suited to a medieval village square setting, scale? We are also faced with a unique opportunity: Make relationships matter and we achieve a degree of authenticity that automatically increases trust in the world we live in and its evolution.

That is about as good a win-win scenario as it can get.

Summary

The perception that trust is a difficult thing to attain or obtain in a digital setting is patently false. Because we are more intently focused in what we are doing and our intent is clearer in the digital space, it becomes easier to create trusting relationships and trusted networks. The moment we venture into cyberspace we become part of a human-machine hybrid where both our humanity and our sense of trust are made manifest and instantly matter to both a digital platform’s algorithms and its human population.

Five Key Questions to Answer

1. How do you generate genuine engagement in your social media presence? Discuss this in detail and give examples of instances where this has worked and where this has failed.
2. How human is your social media posting? Explain your social media strategy and how this helps you promote the core values of your company, or brand. Be very precise and detailed, explain the connection between the subjects you post about and the tone you use and the core values and beliefs of your organization.
3. What more could you do to humanize your brand?
4. How do you make sure that the relationships you form online matter? Give specific examples of how you achieve that as an individual, a company or a brand.
5. What is the key to your social media activity? What is the specific direction that guides it across all digital platforms? Give a detailed answer that explains your philosophy when it comes to social media engagement.

Extract from: The Tribe That Discovered Trust: How trust is created lost and regained in commercial interactions (You can download a free PDF copy of the book, no-strings whatsoever, here.)