Monday Mastery: The 3 elements of trust when communicating with audiences

The trifecta isn't the goal, it's mission critical.

Welcome to Monday Mastery, a series designed to shift your perspective, teach you new techniques, and help you become a more effective writer, one tip at a time.

Last week, I got into a lovely conversation with fellow marketing and communications expert Deborah Kiltner on LinkedIn about brand trust. She had experienced a loss of trust in one of her favorite personal care brands, and she was calling for companies to pay attention to the trust they are building (or losing) with customers.

She asked me this question: When you think about the brands that you deeply trust, what do you think they all have in common?

In my answer, I shared with her my findings from the research I’ve done into trust in communication.

I found that the three key elements of trust are competence, integrity and connection. When you are missing just one of those, trust is broken. In the Cetaphil case, integrity was missing.

In the case of brands I deeply trust, I find them competent (able to meet goals and objectives), they have integrity (transparent and do what they say they are going to do), and I feel a personal connection to them (I identify with the values they've shared).

What Deborah did with that simple framework was impressive, and I wanted to share it here with you today as an object lesson on how to build trust when you are writing for an audience.

For today’s Monday Mastery lesson prompt, I want you to take a piece of writing you’re working on for an audience — a social post, an article, an email, whatever — and put it through the filters of competence, integrity and connection.

• Does it reveal your competence?

• Does it hold up under scrutiny? (Does it have the integrity factor?)

• Does it create connection with your target reader?

If one of those trust elements is missing, see how you might add it in.