By Jarvis Cromwell

By Jarvis Cromwell for The Reputation Garage

Forrester has just released a report on people’s trust in company blogs. The upshot? Very few place a high degree of trust in corporate blogs as an information source. Check it out HERE.

The report, authored by Josh Bernoff, who co-authored the book Groundswell, highlights a survey conducted in Q2 2008 that asked consumers how much trust they had in various information sources. As you can see from the chart below, high trust goes to folks we know. The lowest trust ranking is assigned to company blogs — with only 16% saying they have a high degree of trust in them.

Forrester and the Groundswell team are bringing fresh insight from the front lines of the social media world to a very important issue. We’ve noted here in the Garage that trust in big companies (not just their blogs) reached its lowest ebb in a century in 2002 and hasn’t recovered. Dozens upon dozens of research reports and studies confirm this from every conceivable angle. That’s a big problem for business because trust is transactional – meaning that when there is a lot of trust it accelerates a transaction; and when there distrust it acts a clotting agent. This dynamic applies to any transactions that involve human interaction — whether a blog post, a sale, a conversation, an employee review, etc

David Ogilvy’s oft-quoted line from long ago “the customer is not an idiot, the customer is your wife” holds true here. Most people don’t believe that big companies are in it for them. The Groundswell team’s proscriptive advice to make corporate blogs places where companies truly listen, converse, and help their customers is dead on. As is their advice that companies stop and think before joining the “groundswell.”

These are practices worthy of any true trustmeister!

Back when I was CMO of Thomson Financial, a viral video about Google was making the rounds. From the vantage point of the year 2020, the piece spun a fictional history of Google. Sometime around the year 2013 The New York Times was forced to convert to a newsletter “read mostly by the elderly.”

Now a few years later we’re back to the future. On Tuesday night Columbia University’s J-School hosted its 4th Annual Changing Media Landscape discussion. The consensus? Expect the disruptive changes taking place to accelerate, particularly given the economic environment.

Jacob Weisberg, chairman of Slate, cast the die on the relationship between traditional and new media this way:

“New media and the traditional media are diverging rapidly after a period of relatively peaceful coexistence. We are moving into a conflict model.”

Of course the traditional media model has been under siege for several years and Jeff Jarvis and others have warned about the consequences of failing to adapt. And media company share prices have reflected Wall Street’s concern.

Continue Reading

by PAUL DUNAY

Lots of brands are finding out the hard way that there are plenty of conversations taking place about them online. For good or bad.

Many brands choose to ignore this. But hope is not a strategy.

Since consumers rely heavily on the Web as an authoritative source of information, managing a brand’s online reputation has become a top priority for companies. Here are 5 tips from The Reputation Garage’s “new technology” archives. They could help you avoid a major disaster and reduce the risk of a flogging in the blogosphere. Continue Reading

Nastiness can erupt online and go global overnight. If’ it’s directed at you, “no comment” doesn’t cut it anymore.

Most companies are totally unprepared to deal with the new e-nastiness. That’s worrisome as the Web moves closer to being the prime advertising medium—and reputation conduit—of our time.

Trashing brands online can also be a sport. Witness the faux ads bashing the Chevy Tahoe as a gas-guzzling, global-warming monster. Millions of people watch this stuff then pile on. Is it any wonder companies lose control of the conversation?

When the Web turns against them, executives face the problem of how to manage the blowback. They have two choices: ignore the smaller furies and hope they won’t metastasize, or respond outright to the attacks.

Companies such as Lenovo Group, Southwest Airlines, and Dell now have specialists dedicated to engaging or co-opting their critics. Other businesses hire firms such as BuzzMetrics or Cymfony. Those outfits use algorithms to analyze which bloggers and social media are driving the conversation around issues that matter to marketers. (Trackback to my podcast interview with Jim Nail of Cymfony)

New premium service providers claim they can promote the info you want and suppress the news you don’t. Some say they can make information disappear altogether!

But we know better, of course. The Web is like Whac-A-Mole. For every proactive move, another crisis can flare up elsewhere.

Where is all this headed? I believe anyone’s 15 minutes of infamy is no longer something that gets buried in the sands of time. Google changes all that, and “ruined for life” becomes a very real possibility. Even if you can rebuild your reputation, missteps cost plenty and take a heavy toll on individuals and businesses.

To learn more listen to my podcast with Chief Strategy Officer of iCrossing Adam Lavelle coming up later this week.