Forrester came out with a report today on trust and corporate blogging. We won’t mince words: it’s tough.
According to the report (authored by Josh Bernoff, who co-wrote Groundswell), only 16% of US adults trust corporate blogs. We can’t say we’re all that surprised. The themes of trust and transparency have been core issues for the Blog Council since its founding. Earlier this year, we released the Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit as a resource for helping companies establish their own policies and ensure corporate social media is conducted honestly and ethically.
What’s clear is that while there is a lot of work still to do, corporate blogs do work. The report specifically highlighted some examples of corporate blogs that are trustworthy — Dell, Rubbermaid, and Microsoft (all Blog Council members, by the way) — because they put their customer first and exist to help solve their problems. We completely agree. In fact, every single one of the speakers at BlogWell in September indicated that the purpose of their blogs first and foremost was to listen to their customers and help make their lives better.
Here are some other examples of trustworthy blogs, too (and yes, they are all Blog Council members):
- AccuQuote
- Analog Devices
- Cisco Systems
- Coca-Cola
- Dell
- General Electric
- General Motors
- Graco (Newell Rubbermaid)
- Intel
- Lenovo
- Mayo Clinic
- Molson
- Nokia
- Orange Business Services
- Petro-Canada
- Pitney Bowes
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
- Rubbermaid
- SAP
- Sharpie (Newell Rubbermaid)
- Walmart
- Wells Fargo
The Blog Council encourages everyone to support ethical, honest, transparent corporate blogging.
Learn more:
Josh Bernoff’s blog post about the report
Get a copy of the report
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Interesting article…
You can learn alot from not only reading the
company blogs… but from the design of the
page… and what ELSE is ON the page…
Thank you for sharing this information…
~Patricia Kaehler
.
Thanks for fighting the good fight, bloggers. I think this group is well on its way to promoting practices that will cause you to stand out from the blogs that generated the low trust rating.
There’s a big irony related to your post. It is about trustworthy blogs, yet this post misses one of the most important ways to build credibility into a blog.
The post fails to mention any corporate blogs of companies that are NOT members. I’m sure their are corporate blogs of none members that you consider trustworthy, so why not mention them?
The upshot is that this post lacks some credibility or trustworthiness because it excludes information that would be useful to your reader, but not to you.
This is a common problem on corporate blogs. They don’t like to present something that could cast their companies in a negative light. However, by doing that, they look defensive, like old skool PR.
This entire blog is about trustworthy corporate blogs. We write about them every day.
—-
312-932-9000 / michael@blogcouncil.org / twitter: merubin
I am a Blog Council employee and this is my personal opinion.
Spot on Michael. Your key point is one of my favorites. Corporate Blogs help companies become better at listening. If your business blog is designed to simply shill..then of course it’s value will be suspect.
Josh advises correctly that the best blogs talk about the customer…tell the stories that prospects and readers can identify with….how does your product or service solve real problems…
Josh also follows our advocacy of widespread employee blogging. Employees are the front lines of the customer experience…let them talk. Richard Edelman in the 2008 “Edelman Trust Barometer” says that employee bloggers are 5 times more credible than C-level bloggers. You hire smart people, they like your products or services, feel they are doing important work, and care about the customer. These are the people who should be doing your corporate blogging.
Finally, don’t forget search. Most corporate blog traffic comes from search. This is what I mean by listening. People are out there trying to tell you their needs as expressed by a search. Corporate Blogs are the way to be ‘listening’ to those pleas…to show up in a credible way and say: “We can help”
Chris Baggott
CEO
Compendium Blogware
Thanks for fighting the good fight, bloggers. I think this group is well on its way to promoting practices that will cause you to stand out from the blogs that generated the low trust rating.
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