Why People Don’t Trust Corporate Blogs and What to Do About It

There has been some buzz about a Forrester report’s  conclusion that people do not necessarily trust corporate blogs.   A number of tech PR agencies have chimed in, and there was an article just yesterday on IT Business Edge about this.  It said:

According to a blog post from Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff, just 16 percent of folks who read corporate blogs say they trust them.

To me, the issue of trust and corporate blogs seems almost besides the point.

I mentioned awhile back that people trust blogs more than traditional media.   This has been supported by studies, one of which I referenced in that post.

If traditional media are seen to have veiled conflicts of interests, there is no ambiguity with corporate blogs.  They are written by people with an obvious commercial interest and axe to grind.

Does that mean a corporate blog is necessarily a bad idea?  I have always maintained that “corporate blog” is an oxymoron because when a blog is underwritten by “corporate” this means that you generally will get some party line.  People tend to want to listen to and believe the truly independent (if there is such a thing) voices.

Yet corporate blogs can be a good thing to the extent that they put a human face on the company.   Blogs tie in with the social media-driven ethos of transparency.  They can be great sources of information provided that they are not run like old style PR and marketing mouth pieces.  Particularly for certain industries, where people want to learn and stay attuned to specialized knowledge that a vendor’s employees may have, a corporate blog is still a very good thing, even though in the grand scheme of themes they are not the ultimate harbingers of independent thinking.

Better yet is to encourage the individual voices within your organization to speak out in social media, within certain guidelines of course.   Their corporate affiliation is part of their personal brand.   Their specialized knowledge and efforts to communicate in the social media sphere make them ambassadors for the corporate brand.