Relevance creates trust in a digital world

In the non-pixelated, untracked offline real world that we all live in there is one thing that manages to sway our opinion more than anything else. This is not something new; it has been this way since day 1. I am of course referring to personal recommendations and opinions.

When someone you are ‘connected’ with voices an opinion and tells you that the newest hotel in ‘Vegas’ is truly amazing you believe them and want to find out for yourself. In truth you may not always entirely value their opinion but it would certainly have more impact on you than the hotel themselves or even someone you don’t know telling you the same thing.

In the digital environment we seek out opinions from other people who are ‘just like us’ and we listen to what they have to say, although we may have air of doubt over what is being said (we don’t actually know them after all), we still take on board their comments and are influenced by them. Indeed many of us have even ruled out possible holiday options having read negative reviews on sites such as Trip Advisor. More positively, many of us have confidently booked holidays based on being happy with what others have reported back.

We can conclude then that our purchasing decisions are directly influenced by opinions from strangers, but why do we trust them? We trust them because, as obvious as it may sound, we believe they are real people with real experiences. The question therein lies which are real, where are they and what are they doing?

Let’s take bloggers as our first example. There are over 150m blogs out there, many focused on a particular subject or specialism. These people ‘blog’ because they are experts in or passionate about something (or both) and that is why we read what they have to say. A growing trend in this field is to pay bloggers to talk about a company’s products or services either specifically (the company) or loosely (subject area). This you would imagine would damage the reputation of the blogger and blogs in general, whilst also affecting the way people respond to them, however that is not necessarily the case. If the message on the blog is still highly relevant to both the blogger’s specialism and the audience itself then the fact this is paid content is not actually a problem, in fact it becomes beneficial to all involved.

Now let’s consider UGC (user generated content) on other channels. For travel this is mainly in the form of reviews specific to a particular hotel, company or destination. Trip Advisor alone features over 45 million reviews and opinions, the majority of which they assure us are genuine and from individuals who have had real experiences. In reality most of us expect some reviews to be from hotel owners (or their associates) and of course their rivals, but we can get a clear indication if something is right for us when considering the overall tone and feel of the reviews collectively.

Another area of continued growth is that of UGC video. Channels such as You Tube feature huge amounts of video created and submitted by individuals. Does having them sit on the same channel as many professionally produced recordings affect their impact? No, people will look at the content they want and on this kind of platform are open to varying levels of production. So in essence the same rules apply here as elsewhere, i.e. the user is more likely to believe in any opinion given within a submitted video if it is coming from an individual who has had a real experience.

In summary, the balance of trust appears to sit firmly with the individuals (the ‘real people’) and that is something that we wouldn’t expect to change any time soon. When sharing content ‘people’ should stick to things in which they are interested, have a real opinion, direct experience, understanding and passion for the subject matter. This is what is important and shows – And that is ultimately what dictates the effect it will have on others.

Mark was expanding on his comments contained in the BBC article Is Google taking the 'you' out of YouTube?.