A little girl and her father were crossing a bridge.
The father was kind of scared so he asked his little daughter, “Sweetheart,please hold my hand so that you don’t fall into the river.”
The little girl said,”No, Dad. You hold my hand.”
“What’s the difference? Asked the puzzled father.
“There’s a big difference,” replied the little girl, “If I hold your hand and something happens to me, chances are that I may let your hand go.
But if you hold my hand, I know for sure that no matter what happens, you will never let my hand go.”
That’s trust.
As much as this word gets thrown around in the social marketing sphere, there is a lot of carelessness that is happening with the people that seem to be talking about trust the most.
The Weakness of Trust
The strength that one has to cross that line and put their trust in a person means a strong bond has formed and a certain type of faith has been put into the trustee by the trust-er.
However, trust has a weakness that we all know about.
Trust can break easily.
One wrong thing and it breaks like a wilted flower stem when the wind blows it the wrong way.
Knowing this, we stand on our boxes and sound off the message of what it means for people to trust us and yet we don’t really care about the people that are putting their trust in us.
Ok so I’m still hung up on holding people accountable on social media, and let me tell you why.
The Trust Theory
You see, we all want to become successful online.
Most people associate that with making money, while other people connect that with authority and power.
Either way, it takes the uniformity of the crowd as a whole because you can’t self pronounce yourself as either of these if the masses don’t allow it to happen.
So we aggregate these consequences as making sales or having people talk to us, when in reality, it’s not either of these things, but its the simple fact that people have came to trust us over time.
Trust has the power to change a mind, and that’s the result you see happening for you in the future to be able to accomplish your goals.
We’re not thinking of this in terms of trust, but yet we’re thinking of it in terms of a result that we can see.
When in fact this has happened because a person has slowly became trusting of our theories as a person and start to believe in what we do.
When we see success in terms of what we have done ourselves, then we violate the trust that has been formed with the people that are following us.
It was never our’s to take in the first place.
Success was given, and given only to those who are worthy of really understanding the reason behind this gift.
So when we attribute our successes to something that we did, trust begins to break within our ranks, because this was a gift that has been given by the masses that believe.
The Grounded Theory
People don’t want someone that is never decisive.
They want someone that is always looking out for their best interests at all times, and someone who is grounded in what they believe in.
Change is a hard thing for some people to grasp, and while we are required to adapt to the ever changing world of social media, we should hold some constants that our followers can rest easy on.
The Personal Touch
One thing that should never change about you is the way you live your life on social media.
Your personality goes a long way into staying constant with your followers.
Getting to know someone, and vice versa, is a great way to establish who you are as a person.
Which is why I’m astounded when popular people on social say that they don’t care about anything anymore!
It just baffles me that someone doesn’t care about people, yet still be acclaimed as a top social marketer.
But guess what?
It’s not the people they care about anymore, but the corporations they work for.
Social is still a one on one business, so go stuff that in your pipe!
When you can stay constant with one on one engagement on social media, they begin to get to know who you really are. This goes a long way in establishing that trust that needs to be made on their part.
Why They’ll Abuse It
People will abuse the trust of others because of pride and the feeling that no one else can be right in a situation. While I’m still of the mind that we need a new social media, there are others out there that will attack and say that it’s ok where it is.
The reason for that is because they can’t handle being wrong.
This is where personality goes off the rails and the need for self preservation comes into play.
When you start to feel threatened by someone or something attack becomes imminent.
I’ve seen it over and over again on social media.
A person will jump into someone’s thread, take it over, and spout all kinds of attacks and nonsense that makes absolutely no sense, but does validate why we still need a new social.
It’s because people can’t understand how to approach people that have trust in them, people that have an opinion that is different from their own and yet they will feel threatened by this opinion.
Don’t think I haven’t made a lot of people mad with these past few posts.
First the Underdog, and then the article about holding people accountable, whew, I’ve stirred up a hornets nest!
This is simply things that I am seeing that I want to address on a professional level.
I’m calling the people out that never stop talking about trust, yet will fight you at the drop of a hat, simply destroying the trust that has been given.
Seems as if they have a double standard.
If you really cared about people, then you would care about the words that come out of your mouth and how you address people. Always understanding that if you’re not kind to people, sometimes people don’t even understand light banter and how to take it, that could drive them away as well!
Putting yourself on the back row while you are consistently observant of the feelings of others can show them that you really care.
Don’t Be Careless With Your Trust
Humility doesn’t cost a dime and I think this is the medicine that we all should be taking on a daily basis.
When you can humble yourself down, then you don’t take a chance on someone thinking that you’re better than everyone else.
When you are humble then you’re not shouting your own praises but shouting the praises of others. This allows us to stand out from the crowd by donning a type of camouflage that is seemingly reversible in the way social works.
The more you push yourself to the back burner, the more others will bring you to the front.
It’s a backwards way of doing things, I know, but being humble is not a strategy, it should be the way you are anyway.
When you can adapt to a lifestyle of humility then you are always careful with the trust that has been given to you from your followers on social media.
So stay strong for them.
Stand up for them, care about them, love them.
And whatever you do, don’t break the trust that has been given to you.
They’ll love you for it.
Wade Harman
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