Consumers: Corporate Blogs Not To Be Trusted

While in the back of our minds, we all knew this was true. Corporate blogs, like Jonathan Schwartz Blog and Bob Lutz of GM frequently talk about one thing –they’re companies and their products. In fact, some would argue 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.

In the above graphic, Josh Bernoff has conducted research and found that consumers said they trusted corporate blogs very little. How little?

“Not only do blogs rank below newspapers and portals, they rank below wikis, direct mail, company email, and message board posts”

–in fact, a mere 16%

While I certainly discussed the findings with Josh before the report was published, he has far more details on the report, and answer what you should (and survey methodology) do from his post.

For what it’s worth, I spearheaded the corporate blogging program at Hitachi Data Systems, helped my two recent CEOs start blogging, and am an active ‘corporate’ blogger myself. Love to hear your thoughts on this, were you surprised?

Update: The Blog Council (a third party organization) has addressed the data, and has listed out many of their trusted blogs, I think most are part of their council. I wonder what the Blog Business Summit, Shel Israel, Dave Taylor will say –did corporations follow their instructions –doesn’t look like it.

Update: You can download the report for free, after your register on the Forrester site.

(article source: Jeremiah Owyang SF Bay Area, USA)