Marketing and trust in bloggers

If you're wondering who to target in your marketing campaigns then a useful barometer is one of the recent Forrester Research charts on consumer trust. Check out this new blog post from Forrester's analyst Jeremiah Owyang who republishes some good graphs which I've seen around before in various guises. Useful nonetheless.

The consensus? We trust bloggers very little, but peers more than the media. The paradox I think though is that surely these two camps can often be one and the same.

Comments

[Simon Collister]

At the risk of being corporate mouthpiece edelman's Trust BArometer scores trust elvels in "someone like me" which score higher than all other groups, (media, gov, biz, CEOs , bloggers etc).

You're right that the peer vs media/blogger camps often overlap.

My view is that ask anyone if they trust a generic concept (eg. the media) then there is not a lot most people can empathise with (in fact the opposite is largely true hence distrust in the media).

Attempting to engage the man or woman in the street is and has always been key - only now the interent has made this easier and more important.

Peer-to-peer (or W-o-m) comms applies for all clients both off and online. The thing is it tends to be the digital PR people that get it the most given their proximity to the frontline!

[Lucie Follett]

I can't tell you how many conference lectures (particularly in the US...) I have sat through discussing the anthropological nature of blogging, trust factors, degrees of influence etc, etc (zzzzz...).

From a purely mercenary SEO point of view I would like to add my tuppence worth :

Agree - WoM is always going to be king, and whilst blogs are not going to be a substitute for that, they can provide an accessible means of getting in front of that tgt mkt.

Plus - from an SEO perspective - it's also a very nice feather in the cap to have a product review on a high-volume-traffic blog (particularly one with a high pagerank), preferably with a link (and one not masked by a no follow tag!) to an internal site page on your own site , if only to grab some lovely link love so as to boost your own perceived intrinsic relevance in search engines.

So, all in, provided you set a criteria for the blogs you target, there is value which extends further than you might first think...