Conclusion: The New PR: Securing Trust at Scale
(Following is the conclusion and last of 18 excerpts republished here from Trust Signals: Brand Building in a Post-Truth World.)
Our trust issues didn’t begin with the internet.
The quest for trust didn’t even start with the first humans 300,000 years ago, according to evolutionary biologists....
Chapter 16: Getting Started with Grow With TRUST
“Everybody talks about the weather,” Mark Twain is famously said to have remarked. “But no one does anything about it.”
So it seems to be with trust these days. There is plenty of gnashing of teeth among marketers and communicators about how consumers are less trusting than they used to be. But...
Chapter 15: Sharing Knowledge— Thought Leadership
(Following is Chapter 15 of Trust Signals: Brand Building in a Post-Truth World.)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “thought leader” dates back to an 1887 biography of the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, who the authors called “one of the great thought-leaders in America”...
Chapter 14: Getting Found— Search Presence
(Following is Chapter 14 of Trust Signals: Brand Building in a Post-Truth World.)
In 2015, as Google’s algorithms slowly compelled the fields of PR and SEO to join forces, I gave the same talk at two events: the popular SEO conference State of Search and the Public Relations Society of America’s...
Chapter 13: Making Connections— User Experience
(Following is Chapter 13 of Trust Signals: Brand Building in a Post-Truth World.)
Jeff Bezos once famously said, “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person.”
I’ll take that wisdom a step further. The true test of a brand is whether its customers treat it like a person. Branding,...
A Brief History of Breadcrumbs, Breadcrumbing and the Breadcrumb Trail
Buckle up and keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle because I am about to take you on a wild ride through the history of...
...the breadcrumb.
I realize that at first glance, the thought of learning the history of the breadcrumb probably doesn't get your adrenalin pumping. I mean, a...
Social Media Finfluencers: Should You Trust Them?
It’s been a tough year for Kim Kardashian. She has been in the headlines more than ever – and a lot of it not being good news. Recently, Kim agreed to pay a $1.26 million settlement to the SEC for unlawfully touting crypto security. While many are focusing on what this could mean for the...
Chapter 12: Playing Defense— Reputation Management
(Following is Chapter 12 of Trust Signals: Brand Building in a Post-Truth World.)
To borrow a phrase from George W. Bush’s now-famous critique of President Trump’s 2017 inaugural address: people are believing some “weird shit” these days.
Such as the following:
Starting on the social media site...
Chapter 11: Earning Approval—Third-Party Validation
(Following is Chapter 11 of Trust Signals: Brand Building in a Post-Truth World.)
Influencer endorsements didn’t begin with the Kardashians’ promotion of flat-tummy shakes, hair vitamins, and twenty-five-dollar “couture” lollipops. They go back much further.
One of their earliest uses as trust...
Capterra: Everything You Need to Know About the B2B Software Review Site
Capterra prides itself on being “the web's leading free resource for business software help.” Today, Capterra boasts over 1.5 million validated reviews for over 50,000 products across 900 software categories. Looking at these impressive numbers, it’s hard to believe how far they’ve come.
In this...