Our real trust problem (and how to solve it)

If you’ve spent any time in a government communications environment, at some point you will hear this phrase:

Trust and confidence.

It often gets bandied about by bigwigs, usually as if its meaning were self-evident.

And comms teams are told they are responsible for “building", "lifting", or “driving" trust and confidence - as though these are concrete outputs of day-to-day communications work.

There are plenty of problems with this:

• Trust has dozens of meanings and definitions

• A key driver of trust is personal experience of services, not comms

• Govt departments and councils do silly and controversial things

• Trust is measured in infrequent surveys (blunt, lagging indicators that aren’t very practical or inspiring)

Even if we survey “trust in communications”, audiences don't neatly or even necessarily separate the effectiveness of our comms from the substance of what we communicate.

Bad news delivered well is still bad news.

The new trust environment

A further problem is that pretty much everything else is against us too.

Trust in government is lukewarm at best - local generally fares better than central, but neither is exactly crushing it in the trust stakes. And beyond that, there is substantial and growing mistrust in:

• Institutions, authority in general, and democracy as a system

• Other people

• Social media as an information environment

• Platforms and their incentives (and rightly so)

• The accuracy and quality of info we see

• Data use, privacy, and surveillance

Read through that list again, and then consider it next time your organisation puts out a post on Facebook.

AI complicates things further. A flood of cheap, easy content, deepfake imagery, and an information environment where authenticity is becoming increasingly iffy.

None of this we can influence - not in any kind of meaningful way.

And when this is the case, it would be very easy to get cynical about the whole concept of building trust, or disengage from it altogether.

A better definition of trust

We need a definition of trust that comms and social teams can actually own - one they can confidently (and proactively) deliver on, and that can be measured with leading indicators, not just lagging ones.

Trust expert Rachel Botsman offers a useful starting point: “Of the hundreds of definitions of trust I have studied, most can be reduced to one simple idea: trust is an evaluation of outcomes, of how likely it is that things will go right. Or put another way, trust is fostered when the likelihood of an undesirable outcome is low.”

If we think in terms of our organisation and how it operates, this definition is kinda terrifying.

But for comms and social teams, I think it is a simple but powerful definition we can work with.

Because it moves the idea of trust from abstract reputation building, to something much more tangible - are we showing people what they can expect, and are we delivering on it?

It also connects trust directly back to attention. Attention is relatively easy to win once without trust - but almost bloody impossible to win repeatedly without it.

3 kinds of trust we can actually influence

Given everything above, where do we focus?

Here are three kinds of trust that comms and social teams can genuinely build over time - as opposed to hoping a survey eventually reflects something good.

1. Proof of human

This is trust based on authenticity - the confidence an audience has that there is another human being on the other end of the post, email, press release, or article. Someone who thought about them, chose their words with care, and gives a damn about the result.

In an online environment filled with AI-generated bollocks, this is becoming a genuine differentiator. It sounds pretty basic and obvious but I don’t think it is.

And we can scale it by being More Human Than Human - playing up our unique tastes, ways, and flaws as appropriate.

Basically by showing anything that AI could never (including White Zombie references).

2. Parasocial trust

Parasocial relationships are one-sided - we invest in people who don't know we exist (fun eh).

We used to think of this in terms of television: newsreaders who felt familiar because we spent every evening with them in our living rooms (back when TVs were big, heavy cubes).

Creators and influencers have built entire careers on exactly this dynamic, but very few public sector organisations do this well, or at all.

But repeated exposure to a consistent voice, face, or personality builds familiarity - and familiarity builds trust. Finding those people within our organisations to play this role is, of course, difficult, but can be extremely valuable.

3. Trust in your channel experience

This is the most important one - how well can our audiences trust us to deliver value and not waste their time and attention?

If someone sees a great post of yours and follows your channel - what do the next three posts look like? Do they build trust or betray it with low-level rubbish?

One great piece of content doesn't create channel trust, but a consistent run of useful, relevant, well-crafted content will.

The honest question to ask is: what does our channel actually feel like to someone on the outside? Not in totals of likes or reach averages that flatten everything out (and distort results upward), but post by post, email by email.

Are we publishing things that meet audience needs (building trust), or things that meet internal requests at our audience’s expense (leaking trust)?

What we can do right now

A few principles worth considering or committing to:

Stop the trust leaks first. Before adding anything new, audit what you know is working against you. Jargon, cliches, weasel words and spin, false positivity, obviously AI imagery and captions, plus dud, throwaway posts in general will fit this description. Fix those first.

Lean in hard to your controllables. You can't fix institutional mistrust. You can show up consistently, sound human, use real people, and deliver content your audience actually wants.

Lift the curtain. Show processes, behind-the-scenes moments, how decisions get made. Transparency is a trust driver.

Find your voice - and give your team some freedom in it. ‘Warm, friendly, and professional’ is a bare minimum to be built on in interesting ways, not an end in itself. Let your people sound like themselves.

Use real people, repeatedly. Recognition builds familiarity. Familiarity builds trust. Find the people in your organisation willing to show up on the other side of the camera, and use them regularly.

Personalise where you can. Sign off social responses with names or initials - let people get to know you through all the micro moments as well as the macro.

How we can measure all this

The good news is that this approach to trust is far more measurable than the abstract alternative.

Instead of waiting for a survey that tells us, six months later, that trust has dipped - we can track things in near real-time.

Are we publishing consistently? Is our content tied to our pillars and the things we've said matter to our audience?

Did we write our emails, captions, and comment responses ourselves? Did we personalise or sign off our comments as we set out to?

Are we using real people in our imagery? What is the ratio between real people and graphics-based posts?

And when we plot our performance honestly - not averages that flatten everything out, but a scatter graph that shows every post - is the median creeping up over time? Are the duds getting fewer? Is the time between our bangers getting shorter?

These are the questions that, as a manager, I used to obsess over.

You won't get this stuff right immediately. But you will know pretty quickly when you're heading in the right direction, and that’s all that matters.

What do you reckon? Comment below or email me@seamus.nz