Think about the rise of social networks and social-network marketing. An underlying assumption is that people trust their friends, and so will trust the recommendations their friends make. Every company needs a presence on Facebook and followers on Twitter.
Now, there may be many other good reasons to maintain a company identity on Facebook, Twitter, et. al. But according to Advertising Age, this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer shows that cultivating trust by proxy is not one of them:
It’s a finding that strikes at the foundation of many a social-media marketing philosophy: Tapping into peer-to-peer networks is a way for marketers to tell authentic, credible stories to consumers whose confidence in corporate CEOs, news outlets, government officials and industry analysts has taken a beating. But according to Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer, the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008.
Ad Age suggests that the explosion in social networking itself may be partly to blame: when people actually knew all their friends on Facebook, they might have trusted recommendations from them, but Facebook friends are just as likely to be casual acquaintances now, or people who went to one’s elementary school. No one has 300+ friends they really trust. It further suggests that people know marketing when they see it:
People have caught on to the fact marketers are increasingly behind that influential blog post or tweet. Despite regulations regarding disclosure of marketer-driven efforts, consumers may feel that whatever it is these people are receiving from companies positively influences their endorsements.
In other words, the well is tainted.
But marketers still have to market. So how can they build trust in an increasingly mistrustful internet?
There is no shortcut, unfortunately. We believe the answer lies in providing information consumers want, free from hidden marketing or sales messages. If people come to trust you as an objective voice, they might also trust you as a vendor. It can’t hurt if the information you offer is backed up by sources people still do find reliable, and they vary by field.
A colleague, for instance, trusts few health reform experts more than Dr. John Wennberg, founder of the Dartmouth Atlas Project, which for more than 20 years has documented glaring variations in how medical resources are distributed and used in the United States. In the field of Internet usability, many of us trust Jakob Nielsen far more than most other writers. But then we’ve been following the topics of health care and Internet usability for years because we have clients in those fields. And as with any subject, you yourself need to know something about the topic and its experts to determine whom to trust.
