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"Chris Bolman is the Director of Growth at Percolate. This post originally appeared on the Percolate blog.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nOver the summer of 2013, David Byttow, a former Google software developer, started building a mobile app to solve a problem he had. Byttow noticed he and the engineers he worked with were bad at giving each other feedback, and he wanted a way they could comment honestly on each other\u2019s work without professional or personal backlash for saying something negative. Byttow wanted a way to tell the truth, without revealing who said it.\r\n\r\nEight months later, the most talked about content at SXSW 2014 wasn\u2019t a flashy new tech launch, sharing economy roll-out or big-budget event activation: it was a\u00A0SXSW feed\u00A0from Byttow and co-founder Chrys Bader\u2018s two month old app, Secret, that aggregated and shared honest, anonymous feedback about the conference.\r\n\r\nThe feed, coming on the back of Secret\u2019s $10 million fundraising announcement, caused the app to jump more than 500 spots in the Apple app store rankings over the weekend, making Secret one of the fifty most downloaded social media apps, ahead of Foursquare and Facebook\u2019s new Paper.\r\n\r\nBy itself, Secret is a noteworthy example of product design and community-building in an identity-conscious, mobile feature-unbundling world. But Secret isn\u2019t alone. Its largest competitor Whisper also just\u00A0raised venture funding, another addition to a Snapchat-led ecosystem of apps that help users create, share and consume content that\u2019s genuine, unedited and in the moment.\r\n\r\nIn fact, I see Secret, Whisper and Snapchat as part of a larger content and cultural trend centered around a key\u00A0brand pillar: honesty.\r\nKeeping it real\r\nFrom Sochi to the Oscars to SXSW, honesty and authenticity is consistently winning people\u2019s attention \u2014 not to mention share of voice among marketers.\r\n\r\nAt Sochi, P&amp;amp;amp;G\u2019s honest, heart-felt\u201CThank You Mom (Pick Them Back Up)\u201D\u00A0and \u201CTough Love\u201D attracted as much positive content attention (over 20 million YouTube views and more than 650,000 social shares) as satirical coverage of \u201CSochi fails.\u201D And Ellen\u2019s record-setting, Twitter-breaking Oscar selfie might have been a planned product placement, but it wasn\u2019t rehearsed, and hit Twitter with no edits or photo filters. It just happened, it was authentic, and the world loved it.\r\n\r\nEven retailer Radio Shack was recently able to revitalize its embattled brand during Super Bowl XLVIII with a delightful,content-driven campaign\u00A0that admitted the truth most consumers already knew: it\u2019s an analog 80\u2019s brand struggling to transition to a digital era.\r\n\r\nOutside of event-based content, authenticity matters a lot for marketers too.\u00A0New data\u00A0from Chartbeat finds that a typical online article holds two thirds of people\u2019s attention for at least 15 seconds.\r\n\r\nWith native sponsored stories, average content engagement drops to one third. Moreover, 71 percent of Web visitors scroll vertically on pages with published news stories or blog posts. With native ads that number drops to 24 percent.\r\n\r\nI\u2019m not presenting these stats to say native ads are dishonest or they don\u2019t work, but the data makes one case pretty clear: people bounce from native ads when the content they click through to isn\u2019t what they expected (or wanted). Make your content more authentic and appropriate to the platform you\u2019re publishing to \u2014 like some of the best native advertisers are doing \u2014 and this performance gap between published and paid content closes meaningfully.\r\n\r\nAt the end of the day, people want to be heard, they gravitate to authentic, connected experiences, and they know branded content when they see it. As marketers, we need to craft content that respects these principles, rather than chase ephemeral brand boosts from click-bait, staged stunts or misleading ad units.\r\n\r\nSo now I\u2019ve let you in on one of marketing\u2019s closely held secrets: honesty still works in advertising."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/06/01/mobile-app-honesty-can-make-better-marketer/>