New York PR guy and blogger, Peter Himler has a nice round-up of the reaction to this Forrester ‘trust’ research and particularly the finding that:
Company blogs earned a paltry 16% ranking of “information sources they trusted the most.” By contrast, “Email from people you know” ranked highest with 77%, followed by “Consumer product ratings/reviews” with 60%, and “Portals/search engines” at 50%.
For me, the key problem is the quality of the blogs, rather than blogs as a category, as one blogger (web strategy by Jeremiah) put it:
corporate blogs don’t live up to the dream of naked transparency as we saw from Robert Scoble way back in 2006. Instead, many corporate blogs have become a rehash of press releases written in more of a human tone, yet fail to address the real conversation that’s happening in the marketplace.
People who don’t trust PR, advertising and marketing aren’t going to trust the same content re-badged as a ‘blog’. The ‘blog’ has to give them more information, more discussion and more candour.
Report available here.
