trust and permission marketing

In direct marketing, sometimes we give away freebies.  This gives prospects a chance to identify themselves, and give us their contact information.  These marketing pieces give us a chance to show our prospects who we really are, and demonstrate how useful we can be.  But it's not just how helpful we are, it's also how much trust we can establish.

While there are dedicated snoopers out there that research everything thoroughly, it's certainly not a quick and easy thing to determine if you can trust someone or trust a website.  The traditional means to build trust include a plethora of testimonials, your picture, business address and real phone number, and an iron clad guarantee.  But how about for the casual seller or buyer?  

It'd be interesting if there was a portable reputation/trust packet you could carry with you where ever you went on the web.  Two interesting services I noticed are Opinity and Rapleaf.
Opinity feels like building a myspace profile geared towards building "trustability."  You can insert personal info, friends testimonials, awards, education, etc. and take your identity to where ever you do business.

Rapleaf is more lightweight, has an open api for easier site integration.  You can tie in online and offline transactions, but there is no transaction specific feedback.  You can measure different aspects of the person's rapleaf profile, like difficulty of obtaining the e-mail address, number of positive and negative feedbacks.  

All the value is in the network.  When your reputation system is the one to use, revenue opportunities will present themselves.  The biggest problems are fraud detection (false negatives and false positives) and making big business development deals.