The Dynamics of Digital Relationships

Ultimately we do business with people and businesses we “know, like, and trust”

Know

Awareness is the cornerstone of marketing and advertising. Simply through knowing a person or a brand, you are more likely to do business with them.

Recently, I purchased travel insurance online. I ran a Google search and a long list of results appeared on the screen. How did I select three companies to get quotes from?  Simple: I selected three brands that I had heard of.  Due to these companies advertising to me throughout my life, I had a basic awareness of their brand.  Merely knowing them made me select them ahead of the Insurance brands I had never heard of.  In other words, basic awareness caused me to select these brands and ultimately increased my propensity to spend money.

This also works on a personal level. If you meet two people who you like equally, then start to see person A more than person B, you will start to like person A more. Even if you don’t have an especially positive interaction with person A, so long as it’s not negative, you will like that person more.

In Psychology this is referred to as the 'mere exposure effect'.  The more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more we will tend to like it.  Familiarity breeds liking more than contempt. Things grow on us and we acquire tastes for things over time and repeated exposure.  This is true for all sorts of stimuli - music, products, places, even nonsense syllables.

As per my travel insurance example above, when we make choices, the familiar is often chosen over the unfamiliar: perhaps a case of ‘better the devil you know’.

[As an interesting side note, the mere exposure effect is linked to the disgraced world of subliminal messages (<50ms).]

 Like

The more you know about someone or a business, the more that you notice that you have in common, the more you will like them.

In marketing we talk about the ‘Rule of 7’: it takes seeing someone or something about 7 times before it really makes an impact.  So it takes time, but after about 7 impressions you will start to see results.  People will start to see commonalities, shared interests and shared values. They start to make emotional connection.

Ultimately, as human beings we have a deep seated need to belong and this expresses itself as people aligning to multiple communities of interest.  Seth Godin, one of the worlds most prolific bloggers, talks about this phenomenon in his bestselling book ‘Tribes’: “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader and connected to an idea.”

Trust

You probably operate on Facebook where we talk about personal stuff.  You know lots of people on Facebook.  Hopefully you like most of them.  But do you trust them?  Are they good at what they do in their professional lives?

Knowing and liking are generally pre-requisites for trust but are not enough.  Trust takes time to establish. You need to stay in front of people you want to reach in a helpful and interesting way while demonstrating that you are a knowledgeable expert.

Most importantly, we will give our trust if:

• Your actions are consistent with your words.
• You treat other people well.

Through being authentic, consistent, knowledgeable and helpful, people and brands can develop trust. Trust substantially increases the likelihood of someone buying from your brand.

Of course, this framework describes the dynamics of all relationships.  What Social Media allows you to do is to build relationships at massive scale.

I'm a "Talent Brand Consultant" with LinkedIn, based in Sydney, Australia.  I post articles about LinkedIn Strategies, Content Marketing and Social Media. Follow me by clicking on the 'Follow' button at the top of this post if you would like to receive my articles right in your news feed as they are published.