In their book "Humanize", Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant write, “we have to be careful with the idea of trust because as an idea, it has achieved a status dangerously close to notions like motherhood and apple pie”. I agree.

Both authors emphasize trust is a very personal matter and point out how it is related to the parent-child bond. I agree again.Earning trust: culture, cultivation and responsibility

In Humanize, Maddie and Jamie (who recently spoke in Antwerp, find the presentations here) lay out the ways to be trustworthy, focusing on, among others, corporate culture, responsibility, people-centricity (“them” instead of “us”), truth, processes, consistency and knowledge, all topics we can be…responsible for.

Cultivating trust might be one of the main aspects of a social business. Jamie and Maddie quote Christopher Barger, from a ZDNet interview, titled GM’s Christopher Barger: ‘We’re headed toward a social media version of the dotcom bubble burst’.

Christopher (who still worked for GM at that time and author of The Social Media Strategist) in that blog: “We have a trust gap right now, have had one over the past couple of years at least. Being in social media and taking part in online communities is helping us win back some consumer trust a lot sooner than we might have without it. I also think that being so involved in social is going to make us a better and more responsive company in the future…the more people see us proactively using these networks and communities to take care of our customers, the more people will realize that we do care and do try to make things right when we get it wrong…”.

Trust, caring, doing it right, admitting wrong and truth. A matter of acts and cultivating , both internally and in the ecosystem. More.