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Brandon Mendelson is the coordinator for the Business Card Build-Off, part of America’s largest crowdfunded project, A Million High Fives. Follow @BJMendelson for project updates.

Lincoln once said, “With the public trust, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is possible”. Social media is now a daily activity that millions of people around the world consume and participate in. This is the first time in human history that anyone, no matter who you are or where you are has an opportunity to create, share, and prosper, and if you’re going to succeed and stand out in a heavily crowded social media ocean, you need to earn your audience’s trust.

For those entrepreneurs who have increasingly turned to crowdfunding to fund their projects as advertising dollars dry up, earning trust has become especially important. If you fail in earning the public trust, your project won’t go anywhere, and you won’t be able to raise funds. If you rely on your users to financially support your product, then earning their trust is paramount, because they’re not going to back you if they don’t trust you.

Below is a list of ten things you must do to earn the trust of your online audience. The list is written from a crowdfunding perspective, but this advice really applies to anyone working in social media and seeking the trust of their users.

Earning the Public Trust

1. Tell us who you are. Do you have a website with your name as the domain? If not, get a social networking profile, fill it out completely, and use the domain to point to your profile.

2. Choose your best picture. Common sense, right? But you also want to avoid staged photos that look like you’re selling real estate. Look for a photo that tells your story and use it consistently across all your profiles.

3. Don’t setup a profile on every network. Find your tent poles (Twitter, Facebook), then use one or two smaller networks, like FourSquare and Streamy, and maintain a healthy presence on them. This way, you are where the crowd currently is, and positioned for where they will be.

4. Own your subject. You don’t need to be an expert at first. You should work hard to become one, but when you’re starting out, you should find the book other books and websites in your area reference. Read that book. As time goes on, pick up the books that book referenced. Most non-fiction books tend to regurgitate what’s already out (ditto for websites), but by going to the core book and then going from there you will be ahead of the game.

5. Don’t be fake. A problem many people face online is that we’re sensitive to what everyone wants, so we try to fake it. Nobody wants to give money to a phony. Take the material you’ve learned and put your own spin on it. It won’t be for everyone, but everyone won’t give you money, anyway. People who like and trust you, however, will. Find your voice and the people it appeals to.

6. Be Available. Can I call you? Can I send snail mail? If you want money from your audience and press attention, you need to provide a way to quickly and easily contact you.

7. Be Transparent. Matthew Zachary of the I’m Too Young For This Foundation once said to me that his organization was “Obama-like” in terms of transparency. For any project using your audience’s money, you too have to be “Obama-like” in your transparency. Public budgets, public documents, public receipts, even your emails should be public. Not everything has to be released in the early stages — many crowdfunders fear the loss of their idea to a competitor — but when the project is in motion, open your vaults.

8. Write for the web. People won’t trust what they won’t read. Keep your material short, simple, and useful. Use sub-headings, have a great first sentence (your lead), and keep the article short.

9. Document everything. How are you keeping us posted? Use video more than tweets and blog posts, and update your audience (at least) once a week. Video is the most personal method of online communication.

10. Answer every message. Tweets, video comments, emails. Answer everything. Even if it takes you forever, reply to everyone. If you are building an audience, you have a responsibility (and note, I’m saying you, not your assistant) to reply to your audience until the project has finished.

Earning the public trust takes time. But by following these ten steps consistently, you will be able to help your project succeed.

More social media resources from Mashable:

- How to Be Generous: A Guide for Social Media Brands
- A Control Freak’s Guide to Social Media Influence
- The Importance of Focus: A Guide for Social Media Brands
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business
- Tweetable Eats: What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mevans

Tags: crowdfunding, Lists, public trust, social media, Trust

Kyte has just released its new Mobile Producer app into the App Store [iTunes link]. While it doesn’t require you have an iPhone 3GS, if you want to take advantage of its best feature, video, then you must have one. And if you do, I think you’ll be pretty pleased with how well it works.

The app, which is $4.99, is very simple. You boot it up, log in (or create a new account), and you’re taken to a screen where you put in a title for your “show” (what you’re about to broadcast). Below that are links to add video, a photo, and/or a link. If you choose to add a video you can easily take a new video, or use one you’ve already shot with your iPhone 3GS. The video capture functionality is fast and works just as well as the iPhone’s own video capturing app.

But the real killer features of the Kyte app are its upload speed and even more so, the quality of its videos. While I’ve already gone in depth about why I think video is the killer feature for the iPhone 3GS, based mainly on how well the videos shot on the device look, and how easily they are uploaded to YouTube. But in testing this app out today, I’d say that Kyte’s offering is at least as compelling from an ease-of-use perspective. The video upload was about as speedy as it was to YouTube, but it didn’t feature the annoying rendering time of the YouTube videos I’ve uploaded. And the video quality is noticeably better on Kyte than on YouTube when uploaded from the iPhone 3GS (see below).

One downside to recording the videos in the Kyte app is that they don’t save to your video library on the phone. The other downside is the price: As I mentioned, $4.99. But that’s to make it clear that Kyte is intending this app for its commercial publishers, we’re told. But any Kyte users is able to use it and really, $4.99 isn’t a bad price for a video app that works this well.

This offering is the latest in Kyte’s mobile strategy with regards to the iPhone. Last month, it rolled out a series of branded iPhone apps. Of course, as a live-streaming service, Kyte would love to be able to live-stream from the iPhone 3GS, but that’s still not allowed yet. Hopefully that will change one day.

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