The foundation for any relationship is trust. Last week I had a very interesting meeting and discussion with some execs from enterprise video management platform (VMP) vendor Qumu. As we talked about what I believe is a very exciting market opportunity for the VMP vendors like Qumu, Kaltura, VBrick, Cisco and others I shared what I believe is the real driver behind the increasing interest in video by the enterprise...trust. Trust in the online world is complicated and fragile, yet essential to the social web. As social beings we inherently rely on visual clues to help build trust and friendship. In the online world, while its fairly easy to gather loads of information about a person often the only visual is a tiny avatar on some social network...or maybe a series of pics at best. Add video though and the experience changes. That richer experience helps build the relationship faster and stronger.
This whole conversation got me thinking about trust from a business perspective. Transparency in business is also about trust. Building trust as a business is a key component to engaging customers more effectively. If social CRM is about engagement and conversation then building and maintaining trust with your customers is critical. That may seem obvious but somehow I think maybe its not. Often in the past business has been about doing whatever it takes to drive revenue. Driving short term gain can have severe long term effects. Look at some recent examples of the lack of transparency in business. The most obvious recent case is the Toyota recall debacle. By issuing inaccurate information and failing to take appropriate action the company has severely tarnished its brand which was built around high quality. Autos are complicated machines and in even the most strict quality environment a mistake is possible. If Toyota had taken swift and proper action, been transparent in the market with what it knew and was doing, it could have averted most of the damage.
Another example happened this past weekend with multinational Nestle. Nestle has a Facebook fan page as a part of its social marketing efforts. Having a public forum is a great way to connect with your customers and prospects of course, but it is public. Nestle has long been criticized for using palm oil in its products, a product that is linked to all sorts of ills from deforestation to animal endangerment. Greenpeace posted a video to YouTube that attacked Nestle for threatening the livelihood of Orangutans which Nestle has tried to have removed. As a part of the campaign Greenpeace encouraged its supporters to post comments on the Nestle Facebook fan page and change their avatars to anti-Nestle pics. Nestle reps responded by posting: "To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don't post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic--they will be deleted.", and well intended reps started aggressively responding to posts and removing comments that had altered logos in them. Well, you can imagine how this story goes from here, the conversations on the page rapidly deteriorated. There were Nestle fans there as well, but they were drowned out by the escalating protesters. In the end a Nestle PR rep apologized but the damage was done. Now I won't get into the ethical issue around the use of palm oil, that's not what this post is focused on. Instead think about trust and transparency again. Nestle was put into a tough spot but its reps could have handled the conversation in a much different fashion. At least I'd say if you are planning on maintaining a public forum and you have some business practices that could be shown in a poor light you had better think through how you can handle a public assault and still maintain a positive conversation with your audience. Social marketing is a powerful concept. listening to your customers sounds great, but remember that when you ask someone to talk to you, they have control of what they say, not you. Here's a good post on PR crisis management in our new social web age that you might find interesting.
Ethics, trust, and transparency work hand in hand on the social web. Consumer behavior has changed dramatically because of the Internet. There's so much information available at the touch of a button. You can read reviews, ask your network for advice, and check out brand reputations, all online. And of course you can join the conversation about a brand as well. Frankly brands don't really have a choice about all of this. You cannot control the conversation, you can only participate (or try to ignore it, which doesn't seem like much of a plan to me). Trust online is hard to earn and easy to lose; don't risk your brand by being less than transparent. Somehow it always seems to come out in the end, there are just to many sources of information and you do not control most of them.
