An interview with boundary crosser, Karen Stephenson, reminds me that all the technology, networking, marketing, and wisdom in the world is useless in building a community if one thing is lacking: Trust.

Stephenson calls herself a corporate anthropologist (she has graduate degrees in anthropology) and writes about creating trust in the online world. A few choice quotes from the interview:

"People get into trouble when they start to trust because, "you think like me, you look like me, you walk and talk like I do." So that means that all you have to do to feign trust is be a wolf in sheep’s clothing–to walk and talk and dress and adopt the behaviors of a community…I think you need to distrust familiarity and seek new criteria for why you are going to trust someone."

"How can we measure trust? Frequency of transaction and reliability, the timeliness of it, the expectation of it builds up a credibility that can be quantified. And you can build that on every transaction."

"Trust takes time to grow–so you can’t turn it on and off like a light switch."

The implications for ABV?

Attracting a group of kindred spirits is not enough to build a community. You’ve got to create trust within the community, over time, through your actions, words, behavior. 

I recently got an announcement for a colleague’s new blog, with a request to review the one and only posting and provide a comment. This newbie blogger was so eager to have her blog linked to others and be seen as credible with comments that she sent me a second request two days later, I suppose in response to my lack of response. But honestly, that’s not how it works. People don’t trust a blogger from one posting and lots of great comments. They trust a blogger after reading lots of postings, hearing the blogger’s point of view consistently, and liking what they read. They trust you because they feel they know you, at a deeper level, and usually, that only occurs over time.

One of the things the ABV team is working on is a set of principles around community-building and connected to that, some of the do’s and don’t’s of networking (electronically or other-wise). A few of my personal favorite principles that engender trust:

• Authentic, honest dialogue. Do your words strike a chord in my heart?
• Transparent intentions. Do I believe that there are no hidden agendas?
• Invitation instead of compulsion. Do I feel invited into the community rather than compelled to join the community (ala my colleague’s request to provide a comment)?
• Respect for others’ time and attention. Have you shown me that you value my time and attention or am I subject to the whims of whatever shows up in your head? 

We have all kinds of great tools to create connections. But if leave out the "being" of connecting, it will all be for naught.