Digital Marketing

"Who you" – Trust in Web 2.0

At the end of 2006, Time magazine decided that its person of the year was ‘You’. If you. Everyone who creates and rates content on high-impact sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, and YouTube. The reason behind this is that a change has occurred where the content is no longer generated or rated by experts. Instead, it’s from ordinary people like you.

This is further supported by a recent Revolution survey that showed that within the 16-44 age group:

– 48% have been to a blog site

– 26% have created their own blog.

– 74% have rated or reviewed products, content or services.

Content generated by you and the user

User-generated content is one of the key foundations of Web 2.0. (For those of you who haven’t heard the hype, Web 2.0 is a term created to define the second phase of the Internet after the dot-com crash.) One of the key fundamentals of Web 2.0 is the new functionality that changes the content within a page based on what a user does. But let’s get back to you, after all, this article is about you!

First of all, who are you and more importantly, how can I trust you? In fact, the same question applies to me from their perspective. Who am I, and more importantly, how do you know that everything I write is worth the HTML it is encoded in?

Currently, a flood of new content is being written on the web. The problem is that it is very difficult to determine if the source is accurate and if the people looking at it know anything. So is there anything from web 1.0 that can help us?

Trust the Web 1.0

In the old days (read the 1990s), trust had mostly to do with e-commerce. How could you trust a website enough to give your personal details or credit card numbers to buy something? Subsequently, a comprehensive set of standards was developed to ensure that users trusted your website.

Some of the key points were:

– Show that there is a real organization behind your site (e.g. contact details, about us section)

– Explain what you are going to do with the confidential information.

– Provide third party evidence of your credibility (for example, testimonials)

– Have a professional design.

– Periodically update the site to make it look alive and fresh.

– Avoid all mistakes of any kind.

But are these guidelines still relevant? Do we need other guidelines?

The problem with user-generated content

In Web 2.0, the issue of trust has moved away from the people who run the site and is now beginning to focus more on the people who populate it. People relate to each other on a one-to-one level in many ways, such as:

– Business (eg eBay)

– Pleasure (for example, MySpace, YouTube, Secondlife)

– Information (eg Wikipedia, Digg)

– Classifieds (for example, Craigslist, Gumtree)

The question of “Can I trust this site?” it still exists, but the new problem, ‘Can I trust people?’ now it is equally important. The main difference now is that the content is generated by anyone and then they rate it. How can you be sure that what other users write is true?

For example, there has been some controversy over the reliability of articles on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. An even bigger controversy ensued when a man solicited dates from other men posing as a woman on Craigslist’s personals section. Then he published all his personal data on the web!

Yet another example is online restaurant guides. How can you trust someone’s review when you don’t know their tastes? Is the critic someone who comes out solely for tasty food or someone who comes out for the atmosphere / occasion?

So how do we solve these problems?

Trust 2.0: Ensuring Trust in Web 2.0

To ensure that site visitors continue to trust your site, you must ensure that users are who they say they are. The ways you can achieve this when users sign up include:

– Send an activation link by email

– Send a text message with an activation code.

– Send the activation code to a home or business address

You also can:

– Only allow site visitors to access content / functionality if recommended by a registered user (LinkedIn, the online professional network, does)

– Show people you know your IP address when they log in

– Collect the credit card data of the users

If site visitors know that you have validated the credibility of users creating content, they are much more likely to trust that content.

Other ways to increase trust in user-generated content and improve user credibility include:

– Make user profiles publicly available to everyone in the community (the profile can include tastes, knowledge or experience, for example)

– Allow users to rate a person for their content, services or products (eBay does this)

– Establish a referral system to highlight respected contributors (Amazon now delivers ‘badges’ to reviewers, where they are tagged with ‘real name’ (if the site can verify that it is your real name) or ‘top 500 reviewers’ (if the site feels that the person has given good reviews))

– Have real-time face-to-face interaction (eg Skype on eBay, Winebit)

Of course, you don’t need (or want) to implement all of these techniques; think about what your site is trying to achieve and the needs of your audience. You should then be able to come up with a suitable trust strategy.

conclusion

The guidelines for ensuring trust in Web 1.0 terminals are still very valid in today’s Internet. After all, web users must be able to trust your website and the content that you have placed there. They also need to trust content generated by other users. Follow some of the tips in this article to make sure!

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