When I start talking about emotions online others quite often react and think I mean the dating sites for those wanting to find the significant other. This usually also leads to another discussion topic – can one really trust on the emotions shown in virtual environment and can you trust anything that is mentioned online.

Well, the same questions are the ones companies that aim for an online success should ask themselves. Nowadays, everything is sold with an emotional impact and it does not matter if it is a question about face to face encounter, commercials on television or ads on newspaper or your online communication. If you can make the potential customer connect and feel for you, you are pretty close to the success.

However, this is also something that many companies tend to forget when they put up their webpages or plan their social media channels. It seems that most of the information online is merely “facts” forwarded from company  to whoever-happens-to-notice-it (this is actually something I also noticed in my own research among Finnish tourism companies). Sadly enough, this also affects the company image and brand, because customers are quite aware and educated about social media rules today.

The only exception has been Youtube, which is quite natural. Since 1980’s (at latest, I think) it has been more important to create stories in your videos (e.g. television commercials  like Coca Cola’s First time) than just tell people to come and buy stuff. So it is quite clear that the genre did not change this habit of storytelling even though the media changed.

Another dilemma is that companies do not always understand the meaning of trust. It is so easy to express emotions online, but it is much harder to convince customers, that the emotions you create are real and trustworthy.

Finally, so that people would not get the idea, that everything is done wrong, Digipreacher wants to emphasize that there has been good efforts among some companies, it is just worrying that so many companies are still stick to the old ways.