If you have a new idea, you face the additional challenge of reaching an audience. If you’ve spent any amount of time working on your idea, you may know the ugly reality:people struggle to identify ideas; even those that should hold value for them. Instead, they turn to networks, individuals, and tribes to validate new information. They trust their bartender about biochemistry over a biochemist. There’s a hidden structure of how information spreads—that structure is made up of trust channels.
Everyone who successfully amplified their message and scaled relationships, tapped into trust channels. Some, without knowing it. Perhaps they ran a PR campaign. Maybe they had connected relatives. Maybe an influential person opened doors—they may not even know!
To spread your message, there’s a process. I’ll explain what trust channels are, how they work, why it’s valuable, and why scaling relationships and amplifying your message to the masses is accessible, regardless of your budget or social status.
First, background is helpful here. If you’re a creative individual, or a problem solver you need to know you’re biased.
Stating The Problem: why inventive people struggle
Many inventive people attempt to amplify their message by building a following from scratch—one person at a time. They tend to make a fatal assumption that great ideas speak for themselves. They believe incredible ideas draw in people like a subconscious magnet. There’s a name for this myth: it’s called The Mousetrap Myth, coined by David Burkus. If you’ve been down this road, you know the truth: great ideas don’t matter. Communication and earning immediate trust matters.
The best idea never wins
When human flight was achieved, any reasonable person would assume wall-to-wall media coverage would accompany the breakthrough or at least promptly after. Orville and Wilbur Wright should have been doing non-stop interviews. You’d expect endless discussion on the train. But not until three years later did The New York Times write a single word about it. Three years!
Almost the entire world as of 1908, nearly 5 years after the achievement, had no knowledge human flight had been achieved, according to Rita McGrath in her book Seeing Around Corners. Did word travel slower in the early 1900s? No.
On July 7th in 1907, a sermon from Rev. Father Michael G. Esper in St. Joseph’s Catholic Church about teddy bears harming the human race made national news in 24 hours.
Here’s the tragic truth: having the best idea or product in the world doesn’t matter. What matters is how you communicate that idea and what trust channels you utilize.
Creator bias robs you of objectivity
I work with inventive people often. Some have bootstrapped from nothing. Others have 20M Series A raises from top VCs. Some have half-billion dollar exits. Some are CEOs or CMOs of large companies. All struggle to connect what they do to those who benefit. It’s tough for them to see the communication breakdown.
They suffer from creator baby bias in the same way a parent can’t see past their love for their own baby.
Their struggle reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry is routinely pestered to see a friend’s new baby. He finally relents, horrified at the baby’s ugliness. To the parents however, their baby is beautiful and one-of-a-kind. Even with objectively cute babies, everyone outside the infant’s family and friends sees yet another baby of the thousands they’ve seen in their lifetime.
Ugly or beautiful, you can’t see past your own baby-bias. That’s not entirely bad—it drives you! You know the work that has gone into creating the idea. You know what makes it unique. You’re a believer. That’s to be expected, but the world doesn’t care… yet.
Getting the word out is challenging. In addition to your bias, there’s more noise and trust is difficult to earn. You’re stuck in between a hard and a hard place.
The State of Trust
Media trust is hitting record lows. Viewership for national shows is down. Social media is noisy and polarizing. Disinformation is everywhere. Videos are deep faked. A full Joe Rogan podcast interview can be easily AI-generated. Soon, political candidates will flood the internet with fake damaging content to hide real damaging content—the process of content obfuscation. Despite facing record loneliness, dating apps are stalling.
People are circling the intellectual wagons by tightening their sources for information. Less-trustworthy channels that are not iron-clad are being abandoned. People are turning to local communities and questioning national communities.
The most direct path for you to get an idea into the minds and hearts of your customer in 2030 and beyond is to use their trust channels.
Trust channels defined
Trust channels are the people and networks that surround individuals to inform them of their world. Everyone on the planet is surrounded by not one, not two, but hundreds of trust channels. A trust channel could be a podcast, but it could be your bartender too.
Consider arriving at a cocktail party and the host of the party immediately embraces you. She tells everyone in the room, “You all have to meet <your name>; they’re the best <what you do> in the industry!” In a few seconds, you gained instant trust and credibility that otherwise may have taken years to build with that same group. In this scenario, the host’s trust immediately transferred to you; the host was a key trust channel to a new audience.
This idea and trust channel model scales to an innumerable degree. This is what trust channels are all about. By understanding them, you gain near-instant credibility and idea adoption with massive audiences. Without trust channels, your idea dies. With them, your idea thrives.
It really is that simple.
Examples of trust channels
Trust channels are unlimited and growing daily as our world invents new methods of communication. Some channels have been with us a long time. As of June 2022, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has built a large trust channel of over 3.7 million subscribers. For this reason, PR people have historically relied on media as a trust channel. But times have changed.
Another trust channel that perhaps isn’t top of mind is Marques Brownlee. Better known as MKBHD on YouTube, Brownlee has amassed over 16.8 million subscribers absolutely crushing WSJ and doing so with a fraction of the budget. And Brownlee has developed only a small trust channel when compared to Jimmy Donaldson, known as Mr. Beast. The King of YouTube has 375M subscribers as of writing this. (I keep updating this number!)
Trust channels aren’t just limited to online media or news media however. They can be events like SXSW. The event brought together 270,000 people during their 2022 hybrid event.
Podcasts like The Psychology Podcast are significant trust channels. According to data analytics company SEM Rush, 20% of people say they’ve bought something because their favorite host endorsed it.
Surprisingly, radio is an effective trust channel as well. (Shocked?) According to NPR and Edison Research, “Almost half of all AM/FM radio listeners (46%) say they have considered a new company, product, or service after hearing an ad on the radio.” Radio reaches 82% of the population, making it an often overlooked, but significant trust channel. I should know; I had a live show with iHeart Radio for three years. I hosted 6 Presidential Candidates in the studio, and interviewed celebrities like Mike Rowe and Pauly Shore. If I endorsed a product over the air, the impact was significant.
Trust channels aren’t limited to media, magazines, TV, podcasts, and digital streaming however. Those are top-of-mind examples, but other channels can be even more effective depending on whom you want to reach with your story. A local VFW Post, book clubs, chiropractors, doctors, and local service organizations are often overlooked trust channels. We’ll explore specific channels in a bit.
When promoting a local podcast project, a colleague of mine found the most effective strategy to be simply hitting local events as a speaker and maximizing face-to-face interactions. At one event, attended by only 10 people (there was a severe ice storm) they received 200 web hits amounting to a 2000% conversion rate. When compared to the 0.3% – 0.5% conversion rate of digital ads, it was incredibly effective. Face-to-face trust channels are also often overlooked in our digital age.
Trust channels can also be locations, towns, or countries as well. If you meet someone from your hometown or country while traveling, have you noticed an immediate bond? Oddly, you trust them more than those around you. Although geography is not as effective as individual relationships, it most certainly is a trust channel. Axios has grown rapidly across the country pulling that very lever.
As larger newspapers continue to suffer subscriber decreases, Axios hit their one-millionth subscriber by focusing on local content. Similarly, savvy brands are abandoning national influencers (or nonfluencers) in favor of local “influencers” with much smaller followings but strong high-trust networks. Social media marketing company, Hummingbirds, raised over $5M to build this very model.
Startup Clayton Farms, a purveyor of pesticide-free greens, utilizes a local in-person trust channel approach—door knocking! As a tech company, it would make sense they’d focus on digital growth channels, Google Ads or geo-targeting but they opt to meet their new neighbors face-to-face when they build a new greenhouse in their region. CEO Clayton Mooney credits these in-person efforts for their rapid growth—he knows face-to-face introductions are powerful despite them being harder to qualify.
So, here’s the big question: how do you find a trust channel and know which one to utilize?
Using trust channels
One tech company hired me to attract specific investors. For reasons we will unpack later, the primary trust channel we identified was The Wall Street Journal—and we achieved this goal. The startup sent the article to both interested investors and those who had declined and because WSJ was a notable trust channel it worked: new investors came to the table, and lost investors came back.
But you’d be making a mistake if you simply went after the Wall Street Journal based on my client’s success. It might not be the right trust channel for you. WSJ‘s circulation may by impressive, but your ideal audience concentration there could be low. So, you could theoretically burn months of time on a major channel, but reach no one.
There is no default tactic that works for every brand. That may sound intimidating, but there’s a North Star for every single brand: your audience. When you focus and obsess over them, their trust channels become clear.
The whole trust channel process starts is 1) identify vision and mission 2) clarify messaging 3) utilize trust channels
If it seems like no one does this, you’re correct. The trust channel model is straightforward but involves getting your hands a bit dirty. And few want to take the path less traveled.
1. Vision and Mission
Finding trust channels starts by understanding your core purpose. You find your purpose by defining your vision, mission and ideal audience. If you’re like most brilliant creative folks, you’ve probably skipped that part. It’s a common error.
You were told great products sell themselves.
You believe your customer will see the value you created.
You assume the vision that drives you is obvious to those around you.
None of this is true.
Your audience don’t understand you. It’s also likely your staff or collaborators don’t either. This is perhaps one of the hardest things for a ideator to understand—it’s a point of great conflict.
Creators and innovators are often so focused on solving their customer or audiences problem, they forget how lost there audience truly is. For this reason, they struggle to communicate with their audience resulting in frustration.
Your internal purpose ultimately decides your behavior, whether you know it or not, getting it out in the open aligns everyone.
This is non-negotiable.
Misalignment Is Common and Solvable
In client onboarding, it takes me less than 1 hour to discover conflicting language amongst the leadership team. In some cases they aren’t even remotely aligned on company purpose. This struggle to clearly communicate purpose to investors, stakeholders, and customers is a drag on momentum—it’s not obvious to those suffering from it.
But you may see symptoms.
You may have contacts introduce you incorrectly to colleagues. You may struggle to communicate what you do in a way that makes sense to others. You may have people ask questions to you that seem odd.
Before working on purpose, vision and mission with my clients, I’d often sit on calls with journalists, investors or strategic partners, and hear them struggle through seemingly conflicting statements, scaring off opportunity. I could hear what they were trying to say, but they couldn’t get it out in a cohesive way. This drag on momentum results in ballooning marketing costs and no data into why some strategies worked and others failed.
To understand vision and mission start with audience
Understanding your purpose starts with obsessing over your audience. Spend as much face-time with them as possible. The goal is to understand what drives them. There’s no formal process here, just spend as much time with your target audience as possible. Get to know their problems. Seek to understand them. Don’t sell to them.
You’ll make mistakes and that’s ok. You’ll talk to people who you considered an ideal customer, but are far from it. You’ll discover folks who are your ideal audience but weren’t top on your list. That’s ok.
In his newest book, What A Unicorn Knows, Matthew E. May recounts the story of how Toyota broke into the US Market with their new Lexus brand. After a failed first attempt to gain traction partnering with GM they refined their process of identifying the customer. Toyota decided to maximize face-to-face exposure with US buyers. May explains this Toyota design thinking practice, known as Genchi Genbutsu, or “go look, go see” in Japanese, was the differentiator.
The team spent months fully immersing themselves into the US luxury lifestyle. They rented nice cars, nice condos, stayed in luxury hotels, spent time in luxury venues, and ate at the best restaurants. The launch was successful, and Toyota’s Lexus brand quickly became the most popular American luxury brand. They “out-listened” their competitors.
Understanding your audience and their values requires speaking in their voice. If you feel lost and unsure of who your audience and their values, you’re not alone. Most marketers are poor at this explains David Allison, the world’s leading expert on values and author of The Death of Demographics.
Allison tells a great story about his early career as a condo tower marketer. His team built an extensive demographic profile of their ideal customer: Bob and Sally. They consistently sold out condo buildings, but one truth bothered him: the Bob and Sally demographic only made up 10% of their buyers.
“The ten percent who looked like Bob and Sally, they were very obviously similar on the outside. But actually, everybody in the room was similar—I was just looking at the wrong glasses.” Allison said to me in an interview. “Something I had said or done in the marketing had triggered some values for this group of people and that’s why they were all there. They were identical to each other valuegrahpically even though they were disparate and unlike from a demographic perspective.”
Allison would go on to create the world’s first valuegraphics data set.
Creators find themselves in this same position and because of this have no idea how to replicate their own success. Allison later discovered while his audience may not have aligned demographically, their values were very much aligned.
For my clients, I explain it this way. A vision is the change you want to see in the world, even without you in it. A mission is how you will effectuate that change. Startups and large corporations alike all struggle with this step. It is difficult to truly focus your message on your ideal customer and audience.
Until you complete you vision and mission, not only can partners not enable your growth, but you cannot begin to form a relationship with your audience.
How to write a vision statement:
A vision statement is the change you want to see in the world without you in it. A vision for a climbing gear company might be “Humanity will conquer the highest peaks.” A great vision statement is bigger than you or your company—to find a bold vision, you can’t be written in.
Your vision drives you. Documentation transforms intuition into a reality stakeholders can follow.
How to write a mission statement:
A mission statement defines how you and your brand will achieve the vision. For the climbing company, their mission might be “Creating zero-fail gear to handle the hardest climbs.”
Your mission shows stakeholders a clear path to achieve your vision.
A well-written vision and mission statement force you to accurately identify your audience and ensure all messaging aligns with that audience. It’s magic and create consistent communication with all stakeholders.
When all stakeholders, including leadership, employees, customers, investors, and coworkers understand and communicate your vision and mission, messaging becomes effortless. There are no questions regarding what you stand for and the goals you envision for the company. Vendors communicate your value to other vendors. Employees communicate your value to their network. And best of all, customers can communicate with customers by spreading your message.
Less time is spent and wasted on poor suggestions for new products or new marketing strategies. No time is lost in miscommunication about your product or service. All communication energy is focused on your objective.
To achieve this, messaging needs to be fully rolled out and clarified both internally and externally. Your vision and mission statement is your guide here, if a page on your website doesn’t align with the vision and mission, it’s wrong.
2. Clarify Messaging
Excellent messaging, both internally and externally, solidifies your vision and mission across the entire organization, from marketing campaigns to employee onboarding packets. When all stakeholders like customers, investors, employees, members, and leaders speak a common language, it lowers the friction from idea to action. This is not inconsequential.
Internally, this looks like fewer “checking with the team” conversations, less bureaucracy and more team autonomy. For your organization to utilize trust channels to gain larger audiences and scale relationships, your organization has to be clear on what it stands for and who it serves.
Nothing stops external relationships from forming like internal confusion. Shore that up first, because if you don’t you will be spending money on efforts that repel customer relationships.
Your audience is categorizing you without your permission
First interactions with your audience are opportunities to make a customer for life, but can also permanently close off new relationships—a distinction creative individuals rarely consider.
Think of every new person as if they’re holding a folder in their hand when first interacting with your brand. The more your brand speaks, the closer they are to categorizing you into their internal filing system.
They may categorize you as a social media consultant, woodworker, HR person, accountant, lawyer, or any number of categories. Based on your current messaging, how your employees speak, and your public facing marketing content or website, how accurate do you think they will be?
If they’re right, your messaging was helpful. But if they’re wrong, you may have lost an opportunity not just in that moment, but forever. People rarely re-categorize. The first impression is the lasting one. Now think of this on a larger scale.
Imagine scoring a huge marketing or PR win and your companies messaging didn’t reflect your company vision and mission. The cost of your PR or marketing campaign actually repelled new customers, incorrectly categorizing your brand forever.
Ouch.
Consider a brand that gets a big PR win, and potential customers go looking for the brand with excitement only to find a website that doesn’t reflect their expectations.
Double ouch.
This has most certainly happened to you as a consumer. Picture a moment you saw a product that was interesting to you, but after a quick web search the product wasn’t what you expected or perhaps you abandoned the search, got distracted, became frustrated or worse—formed a relationship with a competitor!
So, let’s get specific, what areas should you ensure align with your vision and mission? Here’s a short list. To be clear, any language that appears on any of these examples must align with your vision and mission.
Internal Communications
- Employee handbooks
- HR Platforms
- Company training assets
- Email communications
- Internal portals and websites
- In-office branding
- Slack channels
- Email signatures
- What else? ____________________
External Communications
- Website
- Social media channels
- Business Cards
- Ads
- Bio
- Staff social media pages
- Staff bylines for contributed articles
- Executive introductions (speeches)
- Press releases
- Sponsorships
- Company profile on member sites, or company forms
- What else? ____________________
When your brand’s messaging is consistent, all stakeholders fully synthesize what the brand stands for in their own words without feeling like they have to memorize a script. That’s powerful.
Vision, mission and messaging come first because building new relationships at scale is difficult if your preexisting community doesn’t have common understanding of your values.
Lack of clarity results in low trust. Trust channels are useless if your brand doesn’t appear to be trustworthy.
3. Utilizing Trust Channels
Trust channels are the most direct path to amplifying your message to key audiences you seek to impact. Depending on your idea and particular goals, your customer’s trust channels are a wide spectrum.
As previously stated, some trust channels are obvious. The Wall Street Journal or Wired Magazine may be trust channels. But others aren’t so obvious. If you want to reach a particular community, for example, the most direct trust channel may be an association President. Sometimes, the most valuable trust channel may be the town bartender, hairdresser or barber. Don’t worry, I’ll clear this up for you.
Stephen Thomas, Ph.D., professor in UMD’s School of Public Health gives us a master class on utilizing a precise trust channel: Barbers. Dr. Thomas formed a national network of barbershops and local clinics to distribute critical health information to the black community.
Black men are less likely to visit a doctor. This means preventable conditions are caught later, making various conditions harder to treat.
“Dr. Thomas and his team of researchers reached out to barbers in the D.C. metro area.” according to the NIH. “They created a network of eight barbershops and two hair salons in the HAIR program.” They discovered partnering with barbershops is an effective way to improve the health of black men.
One of the barbers in this program is Michael Brown. “African American men—we don’t tend to go to the doctor until our arm is all the way off on the floor,” said Brown. “I wanted to help other men be aware that they need regular checkups.”
Dr. Thomas identified a key trust channel in barbers like Brown, saving lives.
Consider the powerful trust shared between a barber, hair stylist, chiropractor, or massage therapist and their clientele. According to Dr. Seth Meyers, in a column for Psychology Today, he likens the relationship to that of a therapist. Clearly, Dr. Thomas’ HAIR approach is a critical and yet often overlooked trust channel.
Barbers are just one channel of thousands however. Right now, your audience is surrounded by thousands of channels they already trust. And what’s the most effective way to discover all of them? Ask.
Identifying and Mapping Trust Channels
The most efficient method for you to identify key trust channels is to simply ask your desired audiences key questions about their habits.
Create a list of your most profitable and best customers. Face to face is ideal, but you can also send out a survey. One client offered gift cards to everyone who filled out their survey. And yes, they got some great data.
Ask open questions that help your audience think. Here are some starter questions, but I have a constantly evolving Google Sheet you can access for free.
- What top 5 YouTube channels are your subscribed to right now?
- What top 5 podcasts are you subscribed to right now?
- Who are the people you trust most on Twitter? Instagram? LinkedIn?
- Which professional groups do you get value out of?
- What non-entertainment places do you routinely visit?
- What daily or weekly tasks are your responsibility at home?
For my full list of over 50 trust channel started questions. Sign up.
A tech client of mine did this very exercise for their dev community. We expected to see many tech-focused publications and developer communities in their trust channels. While some expected channels did pop up on the list, we were stunned many in their audience subscribed to The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. 7 months later the client ended up in The Wall Street Journal.
Visually, it helps to create a spider diagram or mind map with the word “Customer” on a piece of paper, mapping out as many customer trust channels as possible. These trust channels are what you need to utilize to scale relationships and earn instant credibility with that customer.
Identify Channel Champion
When you are amplified in a trust channel, the institutional trust built up over decades transfers to you. It’s a quick path to your audience’s heart. You are surrounded by easy trust channel entry points at this very moment but how do you gain access?
You provide value to the influencing force of that channel: the “channel champion.”
Once you locate critical trust channels to get your message out, some may be simple to utilize. The President of your neighborhood association may require only a phone call to advise her about a new street beautification process. If you are simply aware of the channel, it’s a straightforward ask as long as there’s shared value.
Most channels aren’t as cut and dry.
Journalists, editors of respected publications, YouTubers, or heck, even bartenders, may not trust you immediately. It goes without saying, it’s best to have common connections (also trust channels) introduce you or build that relationship over time but what if your idea is on a timeline? Are you sunk? No
You can immediately open a new trust channel by providing value.
The process of exchanging immediate value for trust dates back thousands of years. In 900-1650 A.D., for example, the Algonquian-speaking Virginia Indians would exchange gifts as an immediate show of trust. Failure to provide value meant death for the outsider. Real death isn’t a factor here—at least I hope not—but your idea will die if you can’t scale relationships around it.
Giving value is a fast way to gain trust within trust channels but not just any value. The value must be brand-agnostic. Those with big ideas will often believe their product or service IS the value. And even if that were the case, the channel champion or those you’re seeking to influence doesn’t trust you yet.
This is why value is defined by the present state of your trust channel champion. Let me give you an example.
Value Exchange Examples
If your target trust channel is a newspaper, the channel champion would be a reporter or editor. Trading value is bringing them a great story their readers will click. Journalists are judged by how many readers engage with their work. If someone brings them a story that accomplishes this goal, trust is instantly earned and follow-up stories become easier. The journalist drove engagement, and the business owner gained exposure.
Pitching brand-agnostic value means you hand them a great story, even without your brand being a part of it. If you can’t imagine what that would be, I can tell you right now your story is already DOA—they will not be writing an ad on your company.
I’ve sent journalists great stories that didn’t involve my clients for the sole purpose of building trust.
Value can be broadly defined. Value can be a shared mission.
In the case of HAIR, the value exchange was altruistic and a shared mission. Because barbers have relationships with their clientele similar to that of a therapist, they naturally want to see them healthy. Dr. Thomas traded value in the form of information to barbers. In exchange, his objective of reaching black men with critical health information was achieved.
Value could simply be fun. I’ve had clients invite trust channel champions to fun experiences for the whole purpose of building a relationship with them and scaling relationships through them as a new trust channel.
If there’s no value exchange to be had, the trust channel remains closed in the same way a door is slammed in the face of political opposition or a religious group you may have had a bad experience with.
Podcasts are a rapidly growing trust channel. When a host spends a lot of time in a consumer’s ear, a strong trust bond is created. How would one trade value with an channel champion such as a podcaster?
As an active podcaster for eight years, a live radio host for three, and a journalist for The Washington Post for a time, the pressure to continually find new ideas never ends. If you can bring a host or writer a unique idea and a guest who can communicate, your idea will likely gain exposure.
I utilize the FART method as my method of choice to pitch great ideas.
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The bottom line here is this, identify the audience you seek to influence, solidify your message, identify their trust channels, and trade value with the channel champion.
Integrity and trust is vital. Try to screw anyone and not only will your trust channels collapse, but they’ll work against you quickly.
In the age of AI, misinformation, shrinking trust, and new media, the ability to communicate your idea is a precision skill. There are thousands of trust channel surrounding the audience you seek to impact. And now you have the tools to access them.
