Author and speaker Bob Burg popularized the three magic words you’ll eventually hear just about any marketing educator say: know, like, and trust. “All things being equal,” he wrote in his 1994 book, Endless Referrals, “people will do business with and refer business to, those people they know, like and trust.” To be clear, I don’t disagree with this general sentiment (although, based on his belief that “the amount of money one makes is directly proportional to how many people they serve,” I doubt we agree on much else).
In the social media era, what’s often forgotten about this statement is the “all things being equal” part. “All things being equal” presents a situation in which a person wants to decide between two (or more) products or services that are relatively equal in value. For example, let’s say you’re looking to hire a financial planner. You search the web for ‘financial planner near me’ and get eight results. You scan the list and recognize a name: “That’s right! I volunteer with Mackenzie, and she’s a financial planner. I should give her a call!”
In this scenario, you know what you need, and what you need is a fairly standard service. If someone offering that service is a person you already have a positive relationship with, you’d probably jump at the chance to work with them and save yourself the hassle of vetting other providers.
As per Burg’s axiom, this is also how referrals work. Maybe you don’t know any financial planners. But you ask your coworkers or friends who they work with. When someone offers a glowing recommendation, you will likely go with whomever they suggest.
This dictum is also true in a parasocial context. Celebrities, politicians, and now influencers trade in their knowability, likeability, and trustworthiness. Since the earliest days of advertising, companies have paid people with strong know, like, and trust factor to promote their products or services. This is one of the reasons there are rules about disclosing paid endorsements; without disclosure, the viewer of the ad often won’t clock that their parasocial relationship with the endorser sways their buying behavior.
Social media loses the “know, like, and trust” plot
In the mid-to-late aughts, social media platforms provided a new way for brands and individuals to develop their know, like, and trust factor among bigger and broader audiences. Social media marketing emerged as a technique that people who lacked access to traditional forms of broadcast media could use to reach bigger audiences than they could have with the kind of in-person networking Burg had in mind in 1994.
The growth of social media and social media platforms coincided with a series of developments reshaping the workforce. A growing segment of workers saw their employment transformed into contract work. College graduates found their degrees didn’t open as many doors as they once did. People with diverse needs (e.g., child care, elder care, chronic illness, etc.) wanted or needed to work but found most jobs unaccommodating. On top of those more material reasons for pursuing non-traditional work, many workers experienced disillusionment, disaffection, and dissatisfaction with work that promised much and delivered little.
Social media and social media marketing seemed to offer a new path—one paved with creativity, meaning, financial freedom, and independence from management prerogatives. All a semi-ambitious “solo entrepreneur” needed to do was invest their time and energy into developing their know-like-and-trust factor. By creating content and interacting with other users (whether potential customers or potential referrers), marketers developed relational clout that could be cashed in as contracts, sales, and referrals.
The savvy marketer learned how to create content and shape interactions in a way that felt generous (and most often was) while also drawing a straight line to a product or service for sale. This worked quite well while platforms were in their initial stages of development and growth. Platforms provided a relatively reliable distribution system and facilitated the back-and-forth that made the media social to begin with. But the path to “know, like, and trust” changed dramatically when platforms entered the phase marked by algorithmic distribution and profit extraction.
Day trading attention?
Cathrynne M. Valente summed up the underlying shift, recalling a headline from her dad’s morning newspaper back in the ‘90s: “Stop talking to each other and starting buying things.” Cory Doctorow neologized this sentiment in what some outlets have named 2024’s Word of the Year: enshittification. Both Valente and Doctorow refer to the lifecycle of platforms and websites—the unrelenting demand of capital that turns something that once served the genuine need for human connection into a flea market of quackery, misinformation, and grifts. The products—Google search, the Facebook newsfeed, your Uber ride—get worse so their makers can (paradoxically) make more money.
In a way, “know, like, and trust” has also become enshittified. Today, “know, like, and trust” is a smoke screen for the real—if subprime—capital: attention. Nowhere is this clearer than in ur-marketing bro Gary Vaynerchuk’s 2024 book, Day Trading Attention. In it, he correctly diagnoses the shift from relationship-based social media distribution (i.e., seeing content made or amplified by people you follow) to algorithmic distribution (e.g., the “for you page”). But instead of acknowledging this game is unwinnable for anyone not willing to sit in front of the harsh glow of their computer 23 hours a day, he proceeds to tell you what to do with those 23 hours. He writes:
Just as a day trader constantly studies financial markets to keep a pulse on what’s happening, you must constantly study what people are paying attention to, the cost associated with capturing that attention, and how it shifts by the day. This is how you’ll find the best marketing and sales strategies for your business or brand. Think of it this way: If you know what people are paying attention to and where they’re paying attention, then you actually have a shot at selling them something.
Day trading is an apt analogy to today’s social media marketing ecosystem.
Day traders buy and sell stocks to pocket small differences in price. A day trader might buy shares of Meta in the morning for one price and sell those same shares in the afternoon for a higher price. The difference (minus fees) is their profit from the trade. Day trading doesn’t create value; it’s not investing, which implies contributing to a pool of capital that can be put to use to create more capital over time. Day trading is, simply put, gaming the system.
Vying for attention is economically vacuous in the same way. Whereas the financial day trader exploits small fluctuations in the price of a stock, the attentional day trader exploits (or engineers) small fluctuations in emotion and alignment.
Social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm described modern advertising not as an argument based on rationality and knowledge but rather as an appeal to emotion (in the 1940s, no less). Modern advertising, he writes, “tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.” The methods and messages of advertising (a product designed to compel attention) “are essentially irrational; they have nothing to do with the qualities of the merchandise, and they smother and kill the critical capacities of the customer like an opiate or outright hypnosis.”
The attentional day trader is always on the lookout for the next mark, the next high, always trading up on whatever emotion will bank them the most “know, like, and trust.” It’s not a long-term strategy. It’s inherently precarious. Vaynerchuk might believe that his processes are replicable—that his system allows him to predict what will work correctly. But even if his is the perfect system for chasing the latest TikTok trend, he’ll always be chasing—one step behind, at the whim of platforms and vectoralists.
Manufacturing attention is not the same thing as marketing. You don’t need attention to run a successful business or forge a meaningful freelance career. Figuring out what people are paying attention to and inserting yourself (and your content) into that value exchange may very well produce views, likes, and shares. It might result in sales—sometimes a lot of sales. However, it doesn’t produce the kind of long-term customer relationships that most businesses require for longevity and sustainability, just as day trading doesn’t produce long-term value for shareholders.
Attention—even shoddily disguised in a “know, like, and trust” trench coat—is the wrong goal.
Attention isn’t connection. Attention isn’t goodwill. Attention isn’t brand loyalty. Attention isn’t customer research. None of these things are mutually exclusive, of course. But attention doesn’t necessarily lead to the higher value things we actually want. Attention doesn’t always lead to sales, clients, or brand deals. It doesn’t naturally flow into a sense of meaning or purpose in our work.
“Attention,” says political commentator and philosopher Chris Hayes, echoing Simone Weil, “is the very substance of life.” The harder we work to direct small snippets of people’s attention toward us, the more we contribute to the sense of alienation and dissatisfaction so palpable in our contemporary culture. “That feeling of having our attention compelled by something we don’t want to put it on is the defining experience of our entire lives … in the 21st century,” argues Hayes.
If our attempts at “know, like, and trust” are merely a way to compel attention, to extract a bit of cognitive bandwidth from a roiling marketplace, we’re hardly doing ourselves or the people we want to connect with any favors.
Attention is ephemeral. What aiming for attention does is ensure that we’ll just need to aim for attention again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. If nothing else, making attention the goal acquiesces to the rules of platforms that become more opaque and blighted by the day. In the process, aiming for attention changes how we create value. It tempts us with the question, “How can I cash in on this attention?” rather than “What do people want or need that I can provide?”
Perhaps Vaynerchuck would disagree with my analysis. Or perhaps he’d simply disagree that “How can I cash in on this attention?” is a harmful and inherently exploitative question. But when the focus of “know, like, and trust” is aimed at attention, the resulting product is either literally or figuratively a branded merch store made possible by sweatshops and copious greenhouse gas emissions.
Good marketing doesn’t seek attention; it seeks a small spark of recognition; it nurtures a connection between the wanter and the wanted. Attention may be the byproduct of good marketing, but it’s not its raison d’etre.
The day trader sees everything as a transaction. Whether the target customer sees a brand or a creator as worthy of their “know, like, and trust” only matters as it’s a leverage point for the next exchange. Or as Fromm put it, modern advertising (and propaganda) “flatter the individual by making him appear important, and by pretending that they appeal to his critical judgment … But these pretenses are essentially a method to dull the individual’s suspicions and to help him fool himself as to the individual character of his decision.”
“Know, like, and trust” should not be a shortcut to attention leading to opportunism.
A good marketer—a remarkable marketer—takes the potential customer, their needs, and their desires seriously. They make marketing that values the prospect’s discernment. They encourage critical judgment. Whether they do that through word-of-mouth, Facebook ads, email marketing, TikTok videos, networking, or any other marketing medium doesn’t matter. Good marketing follows these principles regardless of the form it takes and the market it appears in.
