I was reading Fred Wilson’s AVC.com blog this morning (as I do every morning), and I thought his post on trust was a really important one. He was talking about it in the context of building successful web applications, but I don’t think it’s only applicable to internet businesses.

As marketer Seth Godin wrote on his blog earlier this year, the most important questions are not:

Is my price low enough?

Is it reliable enough?

Do I offer enough features?

Am I on the right social media channels?

Is the website cool enough?

Am I promising enough?

No, the most important question in marketing something to someone who hasn’t purchased it before is,

“Do they trust me enough to believe my promises?”

Without that, you have nothing.

I thought this was such an awesome, yet simple, post that I actually circulated it to a bunch of people in the office after I read it. Because whether you’re marketing widgets, marketing private cloud storage, marketing to investors, or marketing new condominiums, that question of trust is paramount.

And it’s for that reason that I think social media and mediums such as blogging have become so important. Customers want to feel like they trust you before they buy your product. The best brands know this and forge “relationships” with their customers. And with the tools at our disposal today, it’s become a lot easier for companies to do that.

I’m reading a great book right now called Tech and the City. I’m only 31% of the way through it (according to my Kindle app), but already it’s been an interesting read. It’s about the making and rise of New York City as a technology and startup hub – which, is fairly recent phenomenon. There aren’t too many cases where New York plays second or third city, but tech is one of those instances. Silicon Valley dominates.

The book talks about the deliberate efforts that were made, by the Bloomberg administration as well by many others, to diversify New York’s economy away from financial services and towards technology, startups, and entrepreneurship. It gives you all the backstory about the rise of Silicon Alley in the 90s, its subsequent crash in the dot com era, and all the players involved. And yes the reference to Sex and the City is both on purpose and explicit throughout the book.

But at a time where cities all around the world are trying to replicate the success of Silicon Valley, the takeaways from this book are perhaps universally applicable. It certainly got me wondering if, here in Toronto, we’re doing enough to prepare our city to dominate in the 21st century.

Image: Stephen Wilkes

I was reading Fred Wilson’s AVC.com blog this morning (as I do every morning), and I thought his post on trust was a really important one. He was talking about it in the context of building successful web applications, but I don’t think it’s only applicable to internet businesses.

As marketer Seth Godin wrote on his blog earlier this year, the most important questions are not:

Is my price low enough?

Is it reliable enough?

Do I offer enough features?

Am I on the right social media channels?

Is the website cool enough?

Am I promising enough?

No, the most important question in marketing something to someone who hasn’t purchased it before is,

“Do they trust me enough to believe my promises?”

Without that, you have nothing.

I thought this was such an awesome, yet simple, post that I actually circulated it to a bunch of people in the office after I read it. Because whether you’re marketing widgets, marketing private cloud storage, marketing to investors, or marketing new condominiums, that question of trust is paramount.

And it’s for that reason that I think social media and mediums such as blogging have become so important. Customers want to feel like they trust you before they buy your product. The best brands know this and forge “relationships” with their customers. And with the tools at our disposal today, it’s become a lot easier for companies to do that.

I’m reading a great book right now called Tech and the City. I’m only 31% of the way through it (according to my Kindle app), but already it’s been an interesting read. It’s about the making and rise of New York City as a technology and startup hub – which, is fairly recent phenomenon. There aren’t too many cases where New York plays second or third city, but tech is one of those instances. Silicon Valley dominates.

The book talks about the deliberate efforts that were made, by the Bloomberg administration as well by many others, to diversify New York’s economy away from financial services and towards technology, startups, and entrepreneurship. It gives you all the backstory about the rise of Silicon Alley in the 90s, its subsequent crash in the dot com era, and all the players involved. And yes the reference to Sex and the City is both on purpose and explicit throughout the book.

But at a time where cities all around the world are trying to replicate the success of Silicon Valley, the takeaways from this book are perhaps universally applicable. It certainly got me wondering if, here in Toronto, we’re doing enough to prepare our city to dominate in the 21st century.

Image: Stephen Wilkes