Reporting on GlobeScan’s recently released ten-country survey on trust in media, Mark Glaser in his blog MediaShift cites this data: 25 percent of people said they trusted blogs and 23 percent said they did not. The remaining 52 percent expressed no opinion – presumably because they had little experience with blogs. But what about the 48 percent that did express an opinion? Are they active citizens of the blogosphere? In his post titled Which Media do you Trust?, Mark expresses the suspicion that they’re not, and that they – along with all the other respondents in the survey - were judging media they didn’t actually use.
We checked out the details on the GlobeScan site. Sure enough, while respondents were asked which news sources were most important to them, the subsequent question on their trust in the various sources was not in any way based on usage or familiarity with them. So we’d have to agree with Mark that these results are of limited use, at least as regards the new forms of media.
We also agree with Mark that it is difficult to generalize about blogs, or any medium for that matter. “People decide on what they trust on a case-by-case basis,” he says. “The worst thing about the survey is that it overgeneralizes each type of media.”
We concur. You may trust all blogs, or some blogs, and you may trust most of what I say in this blog, or only some of it. What the poll tells us is that peoples’ general impression of blogs is that they are less trustworthy than other information sources. (National TV ranked as the most trusted source.)
Millward Brown came to a similar conclusion based on the results of a survey conducted in the US and UK on the impact of Word of Mouth on purchasing decisions. The survey was conducted using the Lightspeed online panel, with 2000 interviews split evenly between the two countries. People were asked about recent purchase decisions in up to eight product and service categories, specifically focusing on the sources of information that helped them decide which brand to buy. The full list of information sources was summarized into four types of contacts:
- Personal contacts
- Company-led contacts (including salespeople and company websites)
- Independent reviews
- Informal online contacts (consisting of blogs, notice boards, chat rooms, and the like)
In both countries, personal contacts were the most widely used source of information by far, while informal online sources were used only by a minority. Informal online sources were used most often to help research purchases in more complex categories, such as holiday destinations (15%), digital cameras (14%) and mobile phones (11%). Among those who used each source, personal contacts were reported to be the most convincing, relevant and influential, with informal online sources tending to be the least convincing, relevant and influential. These results point to the fact that the Internet is still a place where it is difficult to judge whom you can trust. Without the ability to evaluate body language, tone of voice, and behavior, it is far more difficult to assess whether someone is trustworthy or not. Instead we are forced to judge based on different criteria, for instance:
- Referencing – Content that stacks up with your own views and those of others you already trust will seem more credible.
- Experience - Familiarity builds trust, so a post from a blogster you read and whose previous opinions you found useful will carry more weight than one from an unfamiliar author.
- Consistency - Someone who randomly changes their point of view over time will be less trustworthy than someone who argues the same case consistently.
- Context - Comments from a fellow sufferer posted on a notice board devoted to asthma may be trusted more than a post by an anonymous contributor on Travelocity or CNet.
All in all, trust in the online world is highly situation-specific. Corporations and marketers who use blogs must think long and hard about what makes them seem trustworthy if their opinions are to have an influence.
(Many thanks to Max Kalehoff, who blogs at AttentionMax, and whose e-mails debating this subject with me have helped form this opinion.)
So come on people, whom do you trust online, and why? Please respond with your thoughts, below. And please rate this and other posts to give me feedback on which ones you found most worthwhile. Just click on the grey stars - 5 if you like it a lot, 1 if you don’t like it at all.
(25 votes, average: 3.2 out of 5)
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May 13th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Good analysis, Nigel.
The problem with so much mass-marketer mentality, as suggested in the GlobeScan survey (caveat: I’m not completely submersed in it, so I need to be careful here), is that blogs are being categorized as a media channel, which is extremely valid in some cases and not in others. When you throw in the notion of trust, people don’t really trust or distrust the platform (blog or television or print or telephone or handwritten letter) so much as they trust or distrust the source. Sure, the delivery medium can influence how trust is formed, but the information source and its reputation is at the epicenter. When it comes down to it, blogs are nothing more than the digital residue left behind as people have conversations. Therefore, the question should be: which sources, or better, which PEOPLE, do you trust? Which conversations do you trust? In many ways, many traditional media may suffer in trust because they not conversations, they are one-way.
Regarding the Millward Brown survey, your results make sense and reflect work we’ve conducted. High-consideration categories - like healthcare, electronics, automobiles and media (how we spend our valuable time) among others - are more suspetible to online research (often search engines, which are CGM magnets) and therefore online word of mouth. For example: Are you asking someone in a less reputable discussion forum about a new digital camera which nobody else has (a high-consideration, yet ultimately low consequence purchase)? Or are you a cancer survivor seeking or offering advice, emotional support in an online cancer patient support group (high-consideration, very high consequence scenario)?
Ultimately, I think we are in a transitionary period. As societies become more digital (or just evolve, period), they develop and embrace more sophisticated methods of reputation scoring. That happens in a number of ways, from formal ratings systems like eBay, to informal such as the people who co-exist in favored online affinity groups, all the way to downright human intuition (which we may not even be aware of). Of course, all of the old forms of communication play in as well (like face to face)!
As for you, Nigel? You know I disagree with about half of what you say (and agree with the other half), but I sure as hell trust you! Whether via video, telephone, telegram, sign-language, chanting, smoke signals or in person, I trust you just the same. I could care less about the medium; I care about Nigel, the person, and the conversation. And that fact points to a lot of the key questions big marketers are being forced to ask themselves.
This may sound a little creepy (and please pardon that), but I suspect, after this great ongoing debate online, that your opinion of trust will evolve the next time we see each other in person (probably at an ARF research event) and shake hands.
May 15th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Before I start, I should declare an interest here: I ran the MB research that you’re talking about here Nigel, so I’m not likely to denounce it as nonsense. I’d also have to hope that your view has been formed from my team’s analysis of the research, rather than too much ploughing though data yourself.
So I tend to agree with what you’re saying here.
Trust is a key issue in taking advice, and there can be many different kinds of trust: I take advice from my mother for quite different reasons (and on quite different subjects) to the advice I take from people who seem to know what they are talking about and offer opinions in online fora.
One of the key reasons for trusting someone’s advice is that we have a reason to believe that they understand our situation and/or need, or that we understand the point of view from which they are offering their advice sufficiently well to be able to assess whether it fits our own experience. Reading the comments that someone posts over a period of time (or checking that they are a regular poster) gives me some opportunity to build some trust in their opinion (as I would with Max, a regular and considered contributor here), but it’s difficult to build the same depth of relationship as I have in the ‘real’ (offline) world. This is one of the reasons why we see “high consideration” categories attracting more use of online informal information seeking - because expertise become a bigger driver of trust than empathy.
In part, the media trust issue relates not to the trust in the medium itself (for it is just the delivery mechanism) but the extent to which it allows the recipient to understand the point of view of the transmitter, the ease with which it allows the transmitter to articulate the value of their point of view. For the marketer, the issue again becomes one of choice between different media (or balance across them), selecting the media that best allows them to build a rapport with their audience as well as selecting one that best allows them to reach their audience, and to articulate their brand’s vision.