Trust is a Two-Way Street

After my previous post about trust it got me thinking more about the “trust” relationship and how it is a two-way street.

We see things through rose coloured glasses and limited paradigms that life’s experience has shown us. It’s called tunnel vision.

Many of us go through life with the attitude ‘what’s in it for me’. We rarely look at ourselves through the other person’s perspective and how they perceive us.

I know that I can be guilty of this myself. I’m only human, and as a mediator I should know better and have to constantly remind myself of this fact.

In my last post I touched on the fact that currency for Social media is “trust“. A more legal way of looking at it is “trust” is the ‘good will’ that we have earned with others.

As I was writing it I was thinking more about the perspective of our followers’ trust in us. But what about trusting those who we connect with?

Often I see people on Twitter engaging with the idea of hoping to leverage off our “good will” to bolster their numbers, and/or to sell us something.

So the question begs to be asked — should we be connecting with these people?

Here’s what I do. If they are obvious spammers I just block or report them. As for the rest, if they fall into one of those grey areas I like to use the lists function in Twitter.

Once you start gathering hundreds or even thousands of followers, unless you are God it becomes impossible to keep track of all the chatter. Just ask Jim Carey.

Twitter Lists are wonderful for controlling the flow: 

So I created two lists called ‘new mentions’ and ‘conversations’. I put the new people who engage with me into the “new mentions” list. Over time if these people show that they are genuinely interested in engaging with me I will promote them to my personal “conversations” list. That is the stream I monitor most closely. I prune this list regularly and if someone stops engaging with me I put them back into my general Twitter stream.

Twitter Lists allow me to control the flow, keep track of engagers and to continue following those who no longer engage with me without unfollowing en masse like others do. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

I also don’t automatically follow back somebody who follows me. I know that a lot of people don’t like that and will unfollow me if I don’t reciprocate. But it’s worth the risk because to auto-follow someone is counter-productive to that “trust” thing I was just talking about.

Especially with all the malware and subversive uses of Social Media that’s going on these days; we need to be careful.

Trust is something that should be earned. If someone engages with me and earns my “trust” I will probably follow them back.

Anyhow that’s my take on “trust” in social media, so now I’m interested in reading what you think:

1. Do you auto-follow those who follow you?
2. Do you unfollow those who don’t reciprocate?
3. Do you actively seek celebrity and play the numbers game like so many do?
4. Or are you like me and “trust” in Social Media connections is something that is earned?

Filed under: Blog Tips, Ethics for Bloggers, Favourite Blog Tips, Featured Articles, Social Media Tips facebook, twitter

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