Did the Butler really do it? A story of trust.

Back in my usability days we spent a lot of time talking to customers about trust, and how if they could make changes to their site that increased that level of trust for their potential customers, then they were more likely to be successful.

Roll forward a few years and it was the same argument with eCRM. With so many senders of newsletters you had to build that relationship with the consumer to get them to subscribe, stay and interact. And of course, all good relationships are based on trust.

A bad design on a website for instance isn't a problem because someone may not personally like it, its a problem because it doesn't convey trust for the user and users are typically trained not to interact with any website or email that they feel unsure about.

The problem of phishing is only a problem because of trust; users are taken to a spoof site that looks like their bank's site, eBay, PayPal etc and because it gives the impression of being real they are tricked into trusting it. Often with heavy financial penalties.

So is it a suprise that this trust technique has become part of politics propoganda?

Today I read that two politicians (Dawn Butler, Labour and Sarah Teather, Lib Dem) are fighting over an entry on Wikipedia that has been falsely altered to suggest that Butler stands for the opposite of her actual beliefs, and is accusing Teather directly of doing this. On the surface this is a bit of fun, and certainly an ingenious step by whoever did it.

What I find particularly clever is the site they chose, Wikipedia, a normal digital encyclopedia to most, just like reading Websters online, or perhaps even Britannica. An encyclopedia surely wouldn't get it wrong, they employ researchers to verify every word and check every fact, grey-bearded folk in dusty libraries, and so if Wikipedia says Butler voted for the new Trident program then she must have, they are a sorce to be trusted...

And there's the mistake. The name Wikipedia will be lost on most, another one of those quirky dot com fangled things; and the fact that a wiki is a collabrative tool that anyone can submit too means that it shouldn't have the trusted status that it does. Despite the absence of the bearded researchers, it appears to have all the credentials; a good looking website, lots of useful information that is mostly accurate and is linked to from the first page of a lot of Google searches.

Artifical trust has been placed in a site by the user, and that trust has now been exploited by a political party to change the image of a rival.

A case of the Butler having it done to her.

However, who actually did it is likely to go undiscovered as these things can be done behind false usernames. Unfortunately Abby from NCIS and the technology from CSI don't really exist and we can't really trace any user anywhere in the world... but you already knew not to trust what you saw on TV, right?

Trust me, I'm a blogger!

:~Dax~:

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