Understanding  and managing trust is an essential skill in search engine business. In terms of sociology, trust is the willing acceptance of one's power to affect another - allowing actions that otherwise would not be possible.

Trust is a mighty tool when it comes to signing up new clients, achieving credentials and referrers or building a (social) network.  Achieving trust is a matter of personal chemistry and marketing skills more than technical quality. One can always try using brute force or high-tech feature sets to achieve goals, but in the long run, building trust is a far more powerful and cost efficient option.

Google and other search engines are also heavy users of trust – trust is used as an essential factor to establish and manage rankings, authenticity, authority, privacy or any other factor you can think of.  Search engine success is also due to trust -  only this time the trust comes from common people who trust search engines to provide valuable, unbiased search results.

The Internet itself is very much built on trust. There are dozens of technologies that can be used to build the greatest websites / applications ever, but without trust of common people they have zero possibility for  success.  Trust is the major factor that defines how much publicity / “link love” a service will have and how much traffic will convert to sales/leads/actions etc.

Online trust is not currently the democratically shared asset it once was. Web 2.0 really marked the beginning of new era. Trust in the modern Internet is controlled by authorities, personal connections, fear and suspicion with a label of democracy over it. It's a case of the blind leading the blind.  Thank goodness this is just a phase (like all the others the WWW has been through).  Think of the Internet as a child of its age – a 15 year old teenager with a rebellious personality, an answer to all the questions of the world, and the brain of a headless chicken.

IMO building and managing trust is the most demanding ongoing task any professional has to face. In the field of marketing and managing business trust defines winners and losers. I can’t describe how good it feels when old customers recommend you to other business, or how much it sucks when you notice a lack of trust and there is nothing you can do to overcome situation.

As always, feel free to comment and share your opinions.

PS. Wondering how I received the idea for this entry? A customer of mine said recently  “You know, I preferred your business since I didn’t trust those Indian guys that sent me proposals.”  The irony is that I myself have heard “I just wish your business was from United States…” - xenophobia can create these type of trust-issues.