Why do people still read blogs? There are, obviously, many well-written articles tucked into the blog format by professional journalists, as well as by unpaid savants like Nate Silver. For every one of those, there are some which stick to the old stubborn format of: find a link, jot down my quick thoughts, maybe my readers will know more than me, and maybe I will care. It keeps the readers engaged, in the same way that Northeast driver is in winter, spotting the potholes.
A month ago, Heather Green in BusinessWeek's BlogSpotting wrote a post with the headline Only 16% Trust Corporate Blogs: Are They Worth Doing? She referred to a report by Forrester's "Groundswell" social media analysts. I skimmed the report, and left a brief comment on her blog post. I'd dug this well before, and didn't feel like responding more, but then an account manager from Forrester actually called me on the phone. I figured I'd burn some midnight oil at a later date to provide a more in-depth response. After all, my company is a customer of Forrester research, and I like to see that they're generally doing quality work. My friend John Cass, the author of Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging, was hired as their online community manager seven months back, so this would be an excuse to check in with him as well. [We caught up; he left in November.]
I am not intimately familiar with the work of the Groundswell team; I am not a regular reader of their blog or research. I interacted with Charlene Li for a very brief moment at the Gilbane San Francisco conference years back, and surely I ought to run into Josh Bernoff in Kendall Square sometime. My impression is that, while they are professional researchers, their Groundswell blog still looks like any other blog.
And the report looks like any other Forrester report, but a little shorter. There is 1 page of introduction, 3 pages of charts, 2 pages of text, and 1 page of endnotes. Five analysts assisted Bernoff on the report. It is listed at $279, but Forrester has graciously waived the fee for anyone who registers.
Let's start with the data. Forrester is a huge analyst firm, and has vast surveying resources. In the first half of the year, they conducted their North American Technographics® Media and Marketing Online Survey, in which they had asked a sample of American consumers how well they trusted 18 different media types. Blogs came in dead last at 16%, lower than even online classifieds (20%). The Groundswell team should have recognized this as a possible problem and tried to isolate it. Which blogs or companies are untrustworthy? Instead, they simply wrote this off as people having a general distrust of corporations. Yet one other data point from the survey underwhelms this: email from a company is trusted at 28%-- or 75% more than blogs, and several notches up the list. In his blog post, Bernoff pointed to an Edelman study to back up the point. He'd have been better off pointing to Naomi Klein. The Edelman study pointed out that 58% of Americans trust corporations-- an all-time survey high.
Lacking any solid ground, the study authors recommend that the corporation should create the anti-corporate-blog, since readers don't trust corporate blogs! No example of a bad corporate blog is ever put forth. The only thing they could think of was the apparent lack of a blog by Motrin-- a brand which had triggered a blogstorm of annoyed online moms with a snarky video ad over the November 15-16 weekend, a few weeks before the study was written. Bernoff figured that Motrin lacked a blog to properly respond to this problem. To the casual surfer, Motrin is "owned" by Motrin.com, the website of which points out in small text at the bottom that is published by McNeil Consumer Healthcare. McNeil is owned by by Johnson & Johnson, which has a blog ("JNJ BTW") where the issue was addressed on the Monday after the weekend (On Sunday, one of the angered PR bloggers found the phone number for the press contact for J&J's new ad firm, and called her for comment that day "at her home and it sounded like there were children in the background"). Certainly a drug manufacter should be vigilant, round the clock, for problems due to deficiencies in a product where lives may be at stake. But it's hard to imagine a company keeping phones manned on the weekend for goof-ups that are strictly a result of marketing.
The Motrin episode occupies a single entence in the 7th bullet point. Bullet point number 5 tells us to "blog because you're a celebrity" -- advice as useful as telling us to eat because we're human. There is also a suggestion in the bullet point 9 that Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft created a crisis of succession (and, "in a less visible way," Max Kalehoff leaving Nielsen Buzz Metrics), but it's left a bit open. If there were in fact such a crisis-- and I'm really skeptical either company suffered much-- the lesson should be unequivocal: don't let your blogger become a bigger celebrity than your brand. Isn't that the old media way of doing things?
In all, Forrester recommends, blog about customer problems not your products (#1), but blog about your products if you have hordes of fans (#2; "car mufflers, this probably won't work for you"), and, the coup de grace, you want to be "turning reporters and columnists into bloggers." (#6; ever more tempting as journalism jobs dry up.)
It is #8 that addresses our original issue, trust: "Honest and transparent blogs will get noticed." Then what explains the popularity of fake Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, cited in the point on fan worship? And yet the "honest and transparent" Johnson & Johnson BTW returned to obscurity after the Motrin affair was forgotten? The only 2 comments on the blog since October are from 2 of the J&J bloggers talking to eachother. Are they not using the right consultants? Are they not blogging enough?
A few web users might be aware that BabyCenter.com is owned by J&J -- they bought it from eToys for $10M in 2001. BabyCenter is an older creature than a blog, it may best be described as a simple "online community" with articles, and forums, and thousands of members. It grew some, in 2007, by buying a social networking site, Maya's Mom-- a decision which, incidentally, annoyed existing users (see comments). Their corporate social media strategy goes much more beyond blogging.
As for the original question, it's not even clear what was meant by trust here at all. As one commenter pointed out, the data states that 52% mistrust the yellow pages. Paul Soldera added: "You can't throw together a list of personal and non-personal items and expect people to have balanced answers. The 'trust' sphere that we apply to our personal, media and professional lives is very different." The data also conflates push media (email, radio) with pull media (consumer product ratings, search, yellow pages).
There's a more basic question to ask: where should customers look for information? The blog format is ultimately confounding because it is the publisher's prerogative what gets placed at the top of the page-- not the community's. Blog posts may be good for search engine optimization-- but so do wiki articles.
The source of this problem is a bit of myopia amongst social media evangelists. The social impulse itself viral, which is helped drive its popularity. It transmits through blogging, through tweeting, etc: it conveys social phenomena like sharing gossip, building movements, countering rumors, and hero worship. It's just not always constructive -- building more permanent media resources. Media in this sense is not the channel, but the artifacts (articles, books, sound/video recordings, web databases).
This brought me to introduce the term constructive media five years ago. Here's how it works: information in emails and discussions occasionally get canonized into FAQ's or other online documents, and now in wiki articles and Google Map mashups. The process of collaboratively building documents is necessarily social, but the finished product is a document which can be read by anybody afterwards (In 2005 I reviewed the interplay between the two, calling contructive media the "Yin to Social Software's Yang.") Blogs can be constructive, if they are produced as complete articles and less as discussion threads.
Bernoff et al referred to the "customer community" of National Instruments. Perhaps it seemed to them that an online community is so commonplace that it need not be explained. In the case of National Instruments, it has a very real branding to it, the NI Developer Zone. It enables the community of users to build artifacts: be they solution papers, demos, or sample code. It is similar J&J's BabyCenter-- all the more so that they are not fully appreciated by social media analysts.
What could help is a definition, and a set of metrics for analysts to use. One could devise a constructivity index: how much of the employeebase, and customer base, is participating; how much of the products/features are covered; how quickly are new artifacts produced; how much ability a customer has to get questions answered or push for new products/features.
That's more work than an independent, occasional analyst like myself can do, but I'm open to collaboration. :-)
Update, Saturday January 10th: I did catch up with John Cass, above. He informed me that he had left Forrester two months ago! I did not hear back from Josh Bernoff. By coincidence, his blog post yesterday announced his colleague Jeremiah Owyang's report on community software platforms (six months in the making). I will likely get it through my employer's Forrester subscription. I have no doubt that report reflects good research. I just think that the Bernoff one mentioned here comes up short.
