Last week I shared with you 5 ways of making your USP (or any of your marketing) believable and of being trusted.

They were very rational approaches. The use of guarantees, testimonials, demonstration.

But there's also a more emotional way to be trusted, if you're brave enough.

It's to be open.

Back in 1997, Professor Art Aron of Stony Brook University started a study which has been repeated in various forms many times.

He paired up students who didn't know each other and got them to ask questions to each other. One group asked relatively factual questions. The other started out factually but progressed to more personal, revealing questions, like “what are your most treasured memories?” and “how close and warm are your family?”.

At the end of the exercise, Aron got the pairs to report back on how close they felt to their partner.

Not surprisingly, the partnerships that asked each other the most revealing questions reported feeling much closer to each other.

And those feeling persisted. Weeks later, Aron's team observed that the partnerships who'd revealed more personal information in the study tended to sit next to each other in classes and actually “hang out” outside of classes.

In fact, when they were asked to rate how close they were to various people in their lives, they reported higher scores for the previous strangers they'd revealed personal information to than many people they'd known their whole lives.

Being open, sharing your feelings and personal information tends to make people feel closer to you and trust you more.

They've even observed similar things on dating websites. The people who share more personal details in their profiles tend to get more dates and to report those dates as being successful.

Now I'm not saying you should now fill all your blog posts and emails with personal stories about how sad you felt when you lost your cat when you were a child.

But I do think we could all be a bit braver when it comes to sharing how we really feel, how vulnerable we are.

There's such a huge temptation when we're trying to come across as experts, professionals and authorities that we pretend we have all the answers and we always know what to do.

That's certainly not the case for me. I'm often racked with indecision and worried that I might make a wrong move with my marketing that would make me look amateurish when I'm supposed to be an expert at this.

But I don't think that makes me less of an authority. I think it makes me human.

And humans connect with humans. We trust humans.

Could you be more open and vulnerable in your communication?