The attention wars heat up with the second speaker at Gnomedex, while we are all here at the conference and on twitter and on FriendFeed and on Facebook or the social network of choice that we use, how do we manage attention for our readers. Once we have attention reputation and trust we seem to be fighting a war against entropy, ooh shiny viewpoints that early adopters seem to have. Well, not just early adopters, something we all have, lets go do something else.
The trust equation
- Trust = Social Capital
- Social Capital + Web = Links
- Social Capital + Web = traffic
- Social Capital + Web = Social Proof
- Social Capital + Web = A Big F*ng Network
How you build this and how you build trust determines how well you build out the rest of your social capital. This is probably one of the easiest to prove in terms of social networking and how we approach the use of social networking. How trusted you are on line, and in life in general really helps spell out how well people will trust you in the randomized environment that we live within on the internet.
Of course some people seem trustworthy, and there is always going to be a nut job, that 4% of the population that is a sociopath, who will not listen, which latches on to you and wants to live vicariously through what you have built. There are also huge misunderstandings in the communications tree. Trust is easily broken, not so easy to build, and one bad experience can alter how you approach trust building within the world of social networking.
The part that caught my attention on this one is that in the world of real life and the world of social networking that there is such a huge point of intersection between the two that it takes a sense of what is right to post and what is not right to post to ensure you do not run into issues where you can get fired. While Chris and Julian are not talking about this (maybe they do in their book), but this is also something to note, the intersection of personal and public becomes more blurred. As I blogged about troubles with my company, I did that for a reason, I wanted people in the company or affiliated with the company to publicly know things were up, and that they were being taken care of. That was to build trust amongst a group of people who needed to know and see action to help make the company happy again.
Trust Agents looks like it will be interesting to read and purchase. They make a good argument as to how we have all created a community of trust. We also in many ways enforce our own set of community standards, with good people to know and people we will flash mob when they show up on a social network. The speech about the book is also interesting; hopefully there will be video later that we can watch. There is so much information here that this one needs video so you can watch it two or three times to make sure you got all of this. Like drinking from a fire hose, worth watching.
(Cross-posted @ TechWag)
