Trust, reputation & PayPal: Our journey goes on

During the course of “Introduction to Advertising and Public Relations” we had the opportunity to watch a really interesting TED talk from an amazing and very inspiring woman, Rachel Botsman. Her talk focused on trust and reputation and it was quite a speech that left us with many thoughts and questions about this topic.

The focus of all her speech was on how trust leads us to explore and broaden our horizons and how to deal with trust issues. She also tried to explain why and how we tend to trust certain people at a certain time and under certain circumstances. What makes us feel so sure and open up with those people? In this TEDGlobal, Rachel Botsman tries to give answers to everything. Her guide phrase that follows and hopes to make us understand in the end is “We’ve stopped trusting institutions and started trusting strangers”.

At this talk, Rachel Botsman elaborates issues such as the Trust Leap. The Trust Leap has to do with the fact that we tend to try out everything that is new for us. If we want to get familiar with it and to not feel anxious or fear by thinking of it, we have to trust either this or the whole process of it. Both in real life and cyberspace the way we acquaint trust is the same. This one is called “Climbing the Trust Stack” and has three levels; trusting the idea, trusting the process and trusting the other user. All of them are important for the smooth execution of this process.

Botsman also states that we have to trust people and situations in order to be able to see evolution. When we first climb the trust attack, we might feel weird, but we get to a point that all this seems normal. Our point of view changes really quick. So, we understand that trust enables change and innovation. Trust has evolved in these three major chapters: local, institutional and distributed. Back in the mid-1800s, trust in a great extent was local and accountability-based. In the mid-19th century, trust became institutional and commission-based. Distributed trust is inverted and unbundled (20th -21st century).

Many people talk about how trust in institutions has been declining and actually continue to do so. We should also not forget some important breaches of trust, such as the news Corp phone hacking. We could sum up saying that institutional trust isn’t working nowadays due to the dishonest elites who are afraid to apologize. But we have to focus to something more important; institutional trust cannot survive in the digital age.

Some examples of trusting strangers that Botsman gives are the Airbnbs and the Uber. As for the Airbnbs, something strange is that people are being careful about their behavior. This is happening because they are informed about being rated by hosts. We can all see that online trust really changes our behavior regarding the real world. Moving on to Uber, we have to begin by addressing the case of abuse of distributed trust. We all saw that. Things regarding trust behaviors cannot change. What is really fascinating is that both passengers and drivers feel safer when they are able to see a name, a photo or someone’s ratings. See how technology creates trust in a way that has never been possible before?

To conclude, we must say that after watching Rachel Botsmans’ speech, we were definitely more informed about trust issues and we were able to rethink circumstances and face them by a different point of view. The real disruption happening isn’t technological. It’s the trust shift it creates.

One of the many projects that we discussed and worked on it was about reputation and more specifically about how to corporate reputation matters. We tried to understand why this is so important and draw some conclusions.

Reputation is a really important matter for a company, as it makes people search for your team and your work. Also, it creates reliability, familiarity and trustworthy. So, more and more people want to be represented by you. All kinds of criticism makes you gain popularity.

There are apparently some reputation drives, some methods to be more specific that each company is using to achieve online reputation management. Nowadays, due to the huge outburst of new technologies, companies need more than ever modern and innovative reputation drives. This is happening because they have to promote their own business, they must make it known to the general public and create relationship which are based on trust.

In the next project we chose to analyze PayPal as one of the most trusted brands that exist today. Did you ever think that PayPal is among the most trustworthy companies worldwide? You may not always trust online shopping but PayPal has managed to make every consumer feel safe during their online transactions. This can be accomplished because of their personal data policy which gives to the clients a feeling of safety regarding their personal information. Paypal also offers the security we all need while we shop online, especially during this covid-19 pandemic. Our team has chosen to represent Paypal as our client not only for the safety and the comfort it provides, but also because of other various advantages. For example, Paypal promises fast money transactions and refunds, in case of a problem, and it guaranties very little to no extra cost while at the same time it is easy in use. Lastly it gives comfort to buyers and sellers as well since they know that Paypal reassures their money. So the next time that you’ll get anxious about your online transactions think about the safety that Paypal provides and rest assured that your money is in good hands.

Meanwhile, we met some really interesting people in class who presented us their job and generally what we could do by working on something similar on what they do and assigned us a project about analyzing some advertisements, based on what we had discussed before.

Last but not least, the second guests assigned us a project about two tv series and the differences and similarities between them and the way they are promoted. Our team chose euphoria and la casa de papel and analyzed them in a PowerPoint presentation. We found many similarities but also many differences between them. Our main focus was in the way that each show was presented and promoted through social media, and at that sector the two series had many things in common. For example a common strategy was the use of many hashtags to promote the series, the use of different social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram and generally the bonding between the actors-their characters and the audience, through funny bloopers and emotional moments. The actors from both series also promoted the shows on their personal social media accounts as well, in order to attract more and more people to them and build a stronger fanbase.

We think that cooperation, creativity, passion and hard work can help us create our new start-up company. Our CreADivity.

Trust And Reputation link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13DboNx6dEpcKHl8-92QKbJCmWb0bSf0TTA3xV3gcXuk/edit?usp=sharing

Reputation link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1p6zBOYFoEjFIJnYE7ty0G8fHoT0cMnsigME8c48DcgA/edit?usp=sharing

Paypal Link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZO-ZMVD2KZ7I3fRfGUsM4m7MK1mkE6KqaY6jV4g0YGw/edit?usp=sharing

Launch Strategies link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KeF5BUKI33yGUhgNszggCOaPzwo5IwRRih4rFuRNDbg/edit?usp=sharing

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cread.ivity/

Site: https://infocreadivity.wixsite.com/creadivity

E-mail: info.creadivity@gmail.com

Our members: Glykeria Lappa, Katia Roubi, Manolis Makrydakis, Δανάη Χρανιώτη, Konstantina Papa, Nagia

Professor: Betty Tsakarestou