Without trust, nothing else matters.

You've put hours of hard work into delivering a quality product or service for your customer, and yet, somehow, you've been given a bad review online.

What do you do now?

Cause marketing is the latest addition to the digital marketing menu. Brands looking to build customer and public trust, stand out from the competition, and attract a younger generation of loyal brand advocates are using this marketing method more and more. 

For those who can't wait to find out what's in my upcoming book, Trust Signals: Brand Building in a Post-Truth World, here's a reading of the book's introduction, "The Dirty Little Secret About PR." 

Thought leadership is about helping, not selling. And the right way to do it, interestingly enough, is explained pretty well by the character Dex in the 2000 movie The Tao of Steve.

Steve Jobs. Bill Gates.

Two men born in the 1950s from similar backgrounds who reshaped personal computing—but with two very different visions.

Edward Bernays. Ivy Lee.

In the 1950s and '60s, tobacco companies regularly claimed to have both doctors and scientists on their side. Despite mounting evidence that smoking did indeed cause cancer, the tobacco companies continued to insist that smoking wasn't dangerous. Their ad campaigns featured doctors puffing away on...

PR people say they do more than media relations—but what does that mean exactly, and how does it relate to marketing?

I offer my own take, along with a helpful new definition for PR for today's post-truth world, in this edition of "Trust Signals Live." 

Note: Jennifer Bridges of Reputation Defender co-authored this piece.

Online reviews are a wonderful way to attract new customers. However, they can also be a huge liability, depending on who is reading them.

If your customers are consistently leaving bad reviews—or worse, if you are planting fake...

I've begun broadcasting live on LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube to get the word out about trust signals in anticipation of the book coming out soon.

In this edition of "Trust Signals Live," I walk through the influence continuum as well as the concept of "trust breadcrumbs"—the series of trust...

Nine in 10 internet users rely on online reviews before making purchases today—but two-thirds of consumers are worried about being tricked by fake reviews, a growing problem that so far neither government regulators nor Big Tech has adequately addressed.