This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 
Trust Is as Scarce as Attention
What’s fake?
The internet thrives on affiliation. At its core is the magic that comes from
peer-to-peer connections.
But the forces that prefer dominion instead of affiliation see this as a
threat. And they’ve created waves of distrust around the voices and
channels that we built our cultural trust around.
In addition, alas, the exposed misbehavior and greed of many of the
pillars we count on have also destroyed the benefit of the doubt we’d like to
give those who we look to for leadership.
The result is a moment in time when more people are connected and
fewer are trusted. When science and fact are often thrown into a blender of
willful misinterpretation and hurried misunderstanding. We’re not supposed
to trust spiritual institutions, the mainstream media, politicians, social
networks, or even the person down the street.
Add to this the cacophony of noise (with less signal than ever before)
and the prevalence of fakes and rip-offs, and trust is endangered.
What’s trusted, who’s trusted?
Into this vacuum of mistrust, marketers find themselves on one of three
paths:
Ignored
Sneaking around

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Trusted
If you’re ignored, you can’t accomplish much, because in addition to not
earning trust, you haven’t earned attention either.
If you’re sneaking around, pretending to be one thing while acting in a
different way, you might be able to steal some attention and earn some faux
trust, but it won’t last.
The third method—trust—is the only one that pays for the investment
required. And it’s nice that it’s also the easiest to live with.
A trusted marketer earns enrollment. She can make a promise and keep
it, earning more trust. She can tell a story, uninterrupted, because with the
trust comes attention. That story earns more enrollment, which leads to
more promises and then more trust. And perhaps, if the story is well
organized and resonates, that leads to word of mouth, to the peer-to-peer
conversations that are at the heart of our culture.
Benefit of the doubt is not a myth. There’s a ton of doubt, and you’re
likely not getting the benefit of it. It’s only when people are actually going
where they think you’re going, when their identity and status are already on
the line—that’s when you get the benefit.
And then change happens.