Corporate Blogs Aren’t Trusted: Forrester Research
Posted: December 31st, 2008 | Author: Agitationist | Filed under: blogging | Tags: blogging, corporate, strategy, useful | 8 Comments »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.
(click for full size)
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.
[...]
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.
lmao, did I write this?? I think I did. Like, repeatedly, but you’re funnier.
They can’t be trusted.
They’re thieves & liars.
They will never change.
They don’t care about anything but a temporary gain of a dollar.
They freaking suck.
uhem, thanks for letting me share.
PLEASE rant anytime! Love your site – please keep up the great work.
Excellent piece. I’m wondering though, depending on the goal/s of blogging in the first place, doesn’t it really begin and and with search, seasoned with a little ‘thought leaddership,’ just for kicks? That would mean that the user still matters – if I search and see a blog written by a company, I way not click on the link because I don’t trust the company, but, as you infer, if you’re writing posts for the customer, my sense is that when searching, if the answer lies in a corporate blog or not, I’m going to gravitate to where the information I need is. Right?
Full disclosure: I am a director of digital services, so I make recommendations on coporate blogging when it makes sense to, but *always* with the goal of being customer-oriented and have excellent content straregy in place. After a decade in the TV news industry, I would have lasted without being fixated on content quality, and I find a lot of crossover with the prinipals I first honed there.
My two cents, anyway.
http://jenniferlindsay.com
(in progress)
In our culture, trust, except for religious fundamentalists (who trust on faith), and although natural in children and puppies, is attenuated by experiences. Teasing that is common in childhood and in adult rituals, like “the roast” and social satire builds immunity. The result is that trust is not a given nor is it ever really permanent. Enduring relationships involve knowing what you and the other can be trusted for and conversely.
When I search for information, as Jennifer suggests, it matters not where I find it. Like the Nigerian email scams, when a corporate blogger screws with my search, trust in the source declines.
There’s no difference between a “corporate blog” that falsely represents information as if it were independent and the ads, now illegal, of tobacco, pharmaceutical and automobile industries that intentionally mislead. So what if the internet provides the medium–they are predatory and destructive of trust.
Like Jennifer and Kimberly, I have little time or tolerance for this. However, looking at this the other way, corporate blogs that respect those who seek information by helping rather than selling, take a step up the ladder of trust and earn my respect.
Your bullet points are excellent and I think we could refine your statement, congeal it into a simple, clear statement of principle and also tease out the practices. What do yo think?
Best, Michael
haha, ‘tease out the practices.’
Thanks for the comment to my post on this Forrester report before the holiday.
Your points are excellent. Add Value!
I continually tell our clients that your employees are real people….let them tell stories about how they serve the customer.
Here is my reply:
http://blogging.compendiumblog.com/blog/blogging-best-practices/0/0/employee-bloggers-and-trust-a-ski-vacation-story-v1
[...] recent posting on The Agitationist discusses the trust issue with an eye on what a social media team can do to help. The main gist [...]
I’m happy to have found The Agitationist. I am a Marketing Coordinator for a rapidly growing company and I just started a blog for us. I appreciate the straight talk and am striving everyday to try to have a more human approach. I spend a lot of my time researching for ideas, tips, success stories, and failures because so far I have no comments form consumers. Obviously it’s a work in progress but I appreciate your frank input. Nice job and funny too.