Having a stunning communication by improving audience confidence
You are reading a digital article from an unknown author, are you taking this piece of content seriously?
Hello, I’m a digital media manager; what about you?
We may have some common interests in marketing and digital; are these details giving more impact to the article? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
Let’s step back and introduce properly today’s subject. A media is a place where we are able to share information with an audience. Digital media is giving us the opportunity to broad this audience by sharing on a worldwide access network. Increasingly more people are connected to the Internet, around 4.5 billion in the world. Americans spent more than 395 minutes per day in 2018 on digital media, compared to 214 in 2011. In 2018, the three main digital activities were “check the weather”, “ check the news”, “watch shows”, checking social media remain at the fifth position. These studies show that most of the people browsing time is about seeking information; from a Snap to a Time’s article we want to get informed of what’s happening around us.
On a daily basis, we are reading, watching, interpreting all these data without even knowing or having seen one time the author. Even if this content is participating in our opinion-making.
The following chart gives insights on audience information assessment; from 2012 to 2019 traditional and social media have still respectively the first and latest place according to the audience’s trust.
A social media is a website or an application that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking — Oxford Dictionary.
Social network content is mainly coming from peers and users on re-share and like basis, without even doing any verification on the information veracity. Most of the time social media users engage their selves with post which is highlighting a common point of view.
The Groupe behavior in social media: Antecedents of initial trust formation thesis identify empirically elements behind social media trust; the study is based on three different messages shared within a Facebook group in Bangladesh by community trusted members. These posts are embedded with the usual attributes to reduce audience bias. This study has shown “five strong predictors of trust: norms, monitor, predictability, fulfilled expectation, familiarity”; the fulfilled expectation and familiarity looked to be key in social media to build-up peer's trust. Familiarity made the connection with the social learning theory of Albert Bandura where he is settling the basement of people group behavior. We are more likely to have biased judgment if we share the same intention and opinion.
How improving the audience’s trust within the digital?
Let’s start with one of the most common assets on social media which has been shared more than 3.2 billion daily in 2018, the picture.
Yves Malenfer, photographer and “official content generator” gives us some advice on how to understand why content can be interpreted as credible.
“A photography is the most trustworthy element, we are more likely to believe in what we see”.
Content creators have to take extra care to their picture’s credit to avoid any miscommunication with the audience.
“it is impossible to be sure that a picture is shared as it has been taken originally, according to technologies capabilities”.
We may align our communication in a philosophical way of thinking. If we want to involve people within the story it must self-demonstrate truthfulness.
“opinion is built through information shown on media by crossing different sources”.
As an author, if you are sharing content about a public topic, it would be easier for your audience to cross data coming from different sources, because of event coverage, and see what is related to opinions and facts. Further, you can base your share on your author's reputation or the platform one.
“a series of pictures raises the veracity of the information”
We should give the audience enough details to increase the sentiment of self-opinion making. It’s all about feeling; when we share something we want people to feel it.
Five rules for reliable communication
Let’s leverage some points to develop trustworthy communication:
- Tailor your message according to your target; it’s all about being familiar to your audience and playing as they do. For instance, write with your reader’s words to be aligned with what they are expecting.
- Produce meaningful content and avoid sharing it on the wrong platform. Some places are more related to entertainment or professional contributions. Be your audience any time to spread your message; Is LinkedIn the right place to express your deep thoughts, for instance?
- Touch the audience in many ways using a dissemination strategy via multi-touchpoints to increase the message’s capping. Let’s state a golden rule; the audience meets one purpose per social media. From this statement, one can establish to start a conversation with a catch-line on Twitter or an Instagram story, then a deep-dive on LinkedIn.
- Empower your message thanks to your public cognitive elements is influencing its interpretation; as seen previously the target’s fulfilled expectation and familiarity of your piece of content.
- Embed the message within the right capsule; the content’s format gives opportunities to develop different sides of your opinion. Pictures or videos are giving less space to imagination compare to writing.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.
