Do you hear that? It’s the sound of a crowd of marketers, strategists, consultants, PR flacks and “social media gurus” scrambling for cover.

A December 10th report from Forrester Research is making some people very uncomfortable. And it confirms everything I learned about corporate blogs as a media strategist.

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According to the report, only 16% of consumers who have read corporate blogs consider them trustworthy. That puts them below all other information sources, including wikis, online classifieds, message boards, even direct mail.

Dead last. More people would trust a random stranger to do an appendectomy than take advice from a corporate blog, no matter how cute or clever.

But of course, as Josh Bernhoff from Forrester notes, “Everybody thinks their blog is an exception.”

To which might be added, “everyone thinks they are of above-average intelligence”.

So what advice are the pros giving?

Debbie Weil, the author of The Corporate Blogging Book, takes the “I’ve been telling you this all along” approach, stating:

I wish more corporate types wading into social media would read my book ($6.49 on Amazon). Especially Chapter 7 on how to write an effective corporate blog.

Keep making lemons, Debbie. Keep making lemons.

Meanwhile, the Blog Council - there’s a Blog Council? – exercises their irony muscles (emphasis added):

What’s clear is that while there is a lot of work still to do, corporate blogs do work. The report specifically highlighted some examples of corporate blogs that are trustworthy — Dell, Rubbermaid, and Microsoft (all Blog Council members, by the way) — because they put their customer first and exist to help solve their problems.

The Blog Council: building trust in their own blog by shilling for their members. Well done.

Max Kalehoff, marketing VP at Clickable, states Forrester “gets it wrong”, because:

While the data selected to base the report are great for generating a headline, they’re mostly irrelevant. Blogs are a both a communications channel AND a medium.

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Here’s an analogy: Do you trust telephones? No. But you may eventually build trust with the people with whom you talk and do business with via the telephone.

You’re right, Max: people don’t trust telephones. That’s why they invented Caller ID.  So we could screen out untrusted sources…like, say, your clients.

So basically the responses have been: “it’s the wrong question” or “it’s a flawed study” or “that’s not us”.

That’s fine for an academic circle-jerk debate amongst marketers and strategists. But in this economy, this report could actually cost some people their livelihoods. As such, it should be taken seriously.

So what’s a corporate blog/social media team to do?

Well, for a start:

• Don’t force (or allow) your writers to recycle press releases. Let the people you hired to be creative be creative.
• Start offering something anything of value. 
• Question why you’ve got a blog in the first place, and if the answer is “because we have to”, put someone else in charge. 
• Have enough guts to tell the Chief X Officer that they just don’t get this stuff. 
• Explain that always being in sales mode doesn’t work in this medium. The company is not paying by the inch or the minute.
• Challenge corporate insularity. Solicit contributions and feedback (positive and negative) from real people, and value it when you get it.
• Explain the concept of institutional mistrust to the hand that feeds you.

If you get fired for it, start a blog, tell your story, publish your cease-and-desist letters, get a publicist, and start a consulting firm.

Either way, you win.