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Search Engines, Traditional Media More Trusted than Corporate Blogs

Really interesting info from Josh Bernoff, author of Groundswell and Forrester analyst. (You've likely read his book, written with former Forrester analyst Charlene Li, about the use of social technologies to reach customers.)

His general conclusion, described in a recent blog post about survey data collected in Q2 of this year, is that consumers trust corporate blogs less than any other information source included in the survey. Tops were, naturally, info from friends or groups of other consumers.

He does add more nuance to the issue of lack of trust in corporate blogs and makes some recommendations. The many comments on his post add further dimension and are well worth a look.

What's equally interesting to me, despite the fact that it isn't Mr. Bernoff's main point, is that traditional media fares pretty well, which is not surprising. Much of the value that technology PR brings is reaching journalists (AS WELL AS bloggers, but not one to the exclusion of the other) who themselves vet information about clients or their products or related issues and then, by writing about companies/products/issues, may lend a certain degree of legitimacy to the information.

Journalists generally take care to present "the other side of the story"--information about competitors or different perspectives. Not always, but normally, and that sensitive BS detector and the resulting trust it can create in many people is what makes the media one of the best routes for communicating with target audiences.

Another key point, I thought, was that search engine results are seen as pretty trustworthy. Tech PR, when pursued in concert with smart search engine optimization, can boost organic search results. To me, this survey shows the important benefit that we provide clients when we make technology communications work in concert with SEO.

Posted by Laura Kempke on December 16, 2008 at 10:23 AM