Today we have a guest post from John Haydon who writes about marketing strategy for non-profits on his blog www.JohnHaydon.com.
Integrity, is a critical factor in attracting and retaining readers, subscribers and customers. 
In the offline world, integrity is something people easily recognize. It could be demonstrated by returning something on time that you borrowed, staying true to one’s convictions, or having the courage to protect others from unfair attacks – even if they are “competitors”. In these examples, integrity and character is demonstrated through the actions of that person.
But how do you demonstrated integrity online, through the proxy we call the internet? How can people quickly get a sense of your trustworthiness and character – even though you’re not actually present?
The Trust Of Crowds
The answer is in your crowd – the hundreds or thousands of readers who, on a daily basis, give you the thumbs up.
Blogs by definition have several features that can easily demonstrate crowd-sourced quality checks, or “social proof“.
- Comments – Comments are a qualitative measurement of our character. How many comments, on average, do your blog posts receive? What is the quality and depth of these comments? Is there a diversity of people making these comments? Getting large numbers of quality comments takes years of hard work – even for people like Chris Brogan and Brian Clark.
- Comment Replies – One advantage bloggers like you and I have over people like Chris and Brian is that we are able to reply to each commenter. Two bloggers who do this very well are Grant Griffiths and Liz Strauss. They both take the time to comment back and forth with each commenter. A quick note: Make sure you have set your commenting system to support threaded comments – at least three levels deep.
- Admit When Your Wrong – Or At Least Not Completely Right – No one can know everything about a subject, and often times, it’s our commenters who help us fill in the gaps. When you acknowledge them, and amend a post in response, it says you respect your readers and can admit when you’re not completely right.
- Creative Commons Credit – When you use a CC photo from Flickr, and note attribution, it says you value what another has worked hard to produce.
- Subscriber Counts – This is the number of people that have said: This person offers value that outweighs the pain of getting yet another email in my inbox each week. Feedburner, an RSS service from Google, offers several tools to show off subscriber counts on your blog.
- Twitter Lists – I’ve spoken about Twitter Lists before. They demonstrate how much perceived value a Twitter user has and can easily be displayed within a WordPress sidebar.
- Facebook Shares – Facebook beat Google last month at directing traffic. This is because how we use the web has shifted from searching for something we want to bookmarking or saving articles we receive from trusted friends. The more often your content is shared, the more social proof it demonstrates. Simple Facebook Sharer is a WordPress plugin that will display how many times a post has been shared on Facebook.
- Retweets – Allthough retweets might not have the same weight as subscriber numbers or comments, it’s still a factor in the overall social proof formula. Tweetmeme has a WordPress plugin that shows how many times your post has been retweeted.
- Consistency – Post consistency implies trustworthiness. It is better to post once every week, than five times one week and then none the following week. This is also a powerful way to grow subscribers. During January, when I published a daily series, my subscriber counts shot through the roof. And although I lack the bandwidth to post daily, I still publish a blog post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday – no matter what.
The Greater Whole
Any one of the above factors may not communicate character and integrity by themselves, but together, they can speak volumes. It’s almost like a person’s face. A wrinkle under an eye, doesn’t mean much, but together with laughter and a smile, happiness is conveyed.
How do you demonstrate integrity on your blog?
Photo Credit: I Am Paul’s Typing Fingers
