While our balcony is filled with soccer supporters watching the world cup game between Argentina and Nigeria, drinking Jupilers, I read Rijn Vogelaar’s blog on Trust Agents and Superpromotors (in Dutch). I started writing a comment, but found out that what I had to say was too much to add as a comment, so decided to turn it into a post instead.Rijn writes about the natural tendency of people to help others and the advantages this offers organizations who find out how to harness this power. He argues trust will be restored between consumers and corporations when organizations learn how ‘to create – or rather let emerge’ the situation in which people who happen to work at an organization, help others via social media channels. He is talking about Trust Agents, (from the book with the same name by Brogan and Smith – I haven’t read it by the way), people who happen to work at a company, but help others because they care, not because they are part of a webcare team for instance. Sort of like your nephew or next door neighbor working at XS4ALL and helping you fix your internet connection.
I think Rijn is right in pointing to the potential goodwill this could generate for organizations, including, but not limited to, the fact that people acting of their own accord can ultimately help develop organizations into ‘persons’. Persons, with likeable (and unlikeable) traits, with whom you can interact and develop meaningful, enduring relations. So far so good. But Rijn also points to a potential problem. Organizations need to hang back and let these situations emerge organically. You cannot go around and tell people to start using twitter or facebook and help others in their spare time, while casually acknowledging that they work for your company. This has to happen spontaneously. On the other hand, if you want people to spontaneously help others who are customers of your organization, you accept by default that they use knowledge, and sometimes even privileges acquired while working in your organization, in order to do so.
And that’s the trouble companies find themselves in if they want to rely more heavily on superpromoters and trust agents. Many companies view social media as a marketing, sales, or customer care channel. People using these channels are either deemed to be public relations officers, as for instance the WWF views them, or webcare specialists, or some other breed of people limited by guidelines and codes of conduct.
I don’t think it’s a problem perse that organizations try to manage the conversation by creating guidelines, rather, the trouble is that limiting people by laying down rules of engagement points to a more fundamental problem. The problem of trust. Rules and regulations are put in place to prevent mistakes. To make sure that no sensitive information is shared that might give the competition the advantage. Everyone who has ever done work within contact centers will know that this argumentation is often used by marketing departments to defend the fact that contact center agents don’t learn of new marketing campaigns until 5 minutes before they go live – or worse, from customers after they’ve gone live. In other words, companies have a tendency to distrust the critical faculties of their employees. It is besides the point whether this is true or not, the fact is that limiting behavior like this leads to a loss of authenticity. And authenticity and transparency of motivation is exactly why you do trust your next door neighbor to advise you on which internet provider provides the best service, but not a flashy media campaign.
If organizations refuse to let their employees be themselves – authentic – online, their endeavors will gravitate more and more towards social advertising, or even social spam. We all know how easy it has become to filter annoying TV commercials. Filtering unwanted messages on social platforms is a lot easier, and creative and smart users are already figuring out ways to filter unwantend content – and that’s if they take the trouble to filter specific comments by you and not just defriend you altogether.
In short, organizations need to find a way to deal with the fact that using social media, trust agents and superpromoters to their advantage ultimately comes down to one single thing: TRUSTING agents. This automatically means your organization will become more transparent. It also means organizations need to reconsider which information is confidential because of competitive advantages and which isn’t (hint; much isn’t that exiting or usable to your competitors). Organizations also need to accept that mistakes will be made, and this is perhaps the hardest part.
Rijn ends his argument by pointing to the way in which nurturing your Trust Agents ultimately leads to personifying your company or brand and this is a competitive advantage. This is a good thing, and may provide an antidote to the psychopathic personality traits that large companies are prone to (watch the 2004 documentary “The Corporation” for more info). In order for this to succeed, organizations need to start trusting their employees. The ones that do will be the ones with the greatest competitive advantage. But that’s just my opinion 
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