Charged Up: Is Your Community's Trust Battery Full?

[JoelR]

Every individual in your community or audience has an internal "trust battery" that either fills or depletes based on their interactions with you.

When you fulfill a promise, the battery fills. When you give to your audience without expectation, the battery fills.

When you break their trust, have a negative interaction, or get pushy when asking for a sale, you drain that battery.

• How do we keep our collective trust battery charged with every post, comment, and share?
• What kind of actions do you think fills up your trust battery when interacting in our community?
• Can you share a time when someone else's trust battery seemed full because of your actions?

Do we ever make bad decisions that deplete the trust battery?

• You accept bad sponsors
• You affiliate for a product you don't believe in
• You do cross-promos with brands you don't actually like
• You sell sub-par experiences to your audience

Inspired by Tobi Lütke, founder of Shopify, who coined the metaphor Trust Battery.

[Maria]

One of the major issues I have with users in my community as well as on most communities is that most of them pretend to be an expert. These people try to impart knowledge on almost all topics. It feels very bad to see when someone who has never owned a website starts giving advice on building website. I do not know why most users pretend to be someone they are not. I have trust issues with the users.