Was thinking recently about what defines “Trust” online, and how to build a “Trust Barometer” using a Social Media monitoring platform such as Radian6 or Alterian/Techrigy/SM2.    Could something like that be built that replaces actively asking respondents while using “implied” Trust?   I think it could be, but I don’t think it’s ever been done.

I looked for an a concept of how to segment the levels of Trust and Awareness and found one in the presentation, below, slide 27, which is as good a starting point as any I’ve seen.

Here’s the entire presentation -

Here’s how I might do it -

1. Use Radian or SM2 to get the entire list of content over a specific time period for a Brand (using keyword phases that are targeting the brand – there may be some work to come up with “trust” keywords, as well).  THIS WILL COVER THE “AWARENESS” COLUMN (FAR LEFT)
2. Segment all YouTube and other online video platforms from the total, above, and any PDF files, Company or Brand blogs plus Comments (with positive sentiment) and put them in the second column from the left OR in – this will be NEEDS DETERMINATION (as far as I can tell from slide 27).
3. The third category, as far as I can tell, includes “online sampling” and I’d go with any accounts – blog posts that relate a story (might be more difficult to segment, but doable) and put that in the EVALUATION Category, at center of diagram above.
4. Any purchase activity – which may come from onsite data, but which may be estimated from typical conversion rates for a vertical (I’m thinking of the kind of stats you get at Shop.org or Etail conferences, etc) will be put into the PURCHASE category.
5. Loyalty will be, of all total universe of results for the Brand that we started with, of Facebook Fan Pages, based on the diagram above – that is the final category or LOYALTY, which is a proxy for TRUST.

What do you think?

Maybe I’ll try it with a sample case, soon.