Edelman Trust Barometer 2012 – Lessons for Social Media Teams

 

Last evening I was fortunate to attend the Chicago Social Club event hosted by Edelman’s Richard Edelman and David Armano. The topic was the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer and themes that it implies for business, governments, and NGOs.

One of the more interesting observations from this year’s study is the shift away from trusting government leaders and business leaders towards the average employee in an organization. I take that as a pretty strong signal that we’re starting to come out of the Great Recession of 2008-11. With the disaster of the past years playing such a large role in the average person’s life, it seems appropriate that looking to government leaders to lead us out of the mess would be strong. Trust that our elected leaders would help us find a path forward seemed like a good strategy at the time. However, looking back now, we see that in many ways our leadership in government failed us completely no matter which side of the aisle you support. That break down in trust pushed us back to what I would call our gut feelings. That is, I trust someone more like me than someone who is not like me. The statistics backing this up provided by Richard Edelman were interesting to say the least.  While Americans tend to be very parochial in viewing the world through an America first lens, the rest of the world experienced similar drops in trust for its leadership. For example, Brazil respondents reported a huge 50% drop in trust for their leaders despite their economy doing really well in comparison to the U.S. Europeans responded with a staggering 66% drop in trust of their leaders.

As Richard continued, a simple reason for this came through… there is a huge gap right now between actual performance by our government leaders and their words. The old adage “Words are cheap.” applies here.

So, you are probably thinking what does this have to do with Social Media and Online Communities. Well, in truth it has a lot to do with both.

 Let’s look at what was discussed in terms of corporate trust. CEOs are the second least trusted group following government leaders. In their place in the trust hierarchy, the trust in the “average employee” has risen significantly. To me, a compelling reason for this rise is due to the employees using social media to communicate with each other, customers, prospects, with their network effect spreading the information faster and better than traditional communications. Bloggers play an important role as an information resource, but so do content curators who help audiences skim through massive amounts of information quickly. When Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are used to then spread the information through a network, the message is amplified. With the right source, tone, and level of information, trust is built. We see this all the time in online communities. Those members who reply to others frequently, with good information are trusted more by members than those who don’t answer or engage. That applies to both company personnel and non-company members.

Along these same lines, what struck me as interesting was that of all the industries measured by Edelman technology was trusted the most by respondents. While this has been the case for many years, with the shift towards trusting average employees over CEOs, it makes sense. Companies like Cisco, SAP, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple have had open communication channels with their customers, prospects, partners, developers, and other stakeholders for years. We know that these communities are populated with employees who care about their community members and their information needs. When managed properly, communities build a lot of trust. The movement towards external communities using social media (LinkedIn Groups, Facebook fan pages, etc.) will continue to generate trust for the companies that execute them properly. But it begins with a dedicated group of employees who truly want to engage.

During one of the questions asked, Richard Edelman said “The rise in trust of the average employee to #4 in the survey is controversial to clients. Those who want top down communication not horizontal or peer-to-peer communications find this trend really hard to take. But in the end, you have to allow for the dispersion of ideas.” Unfortunately those companies see the risk as too great versus the potential reward.

In our experience over the past twelve years, we’ve seen those companies that keep their eye on the reward make gains that bring value to their organization using communities and social media. Those that focus on the risk not only don’t bring the value they could, but also make the social media mistakes that you read about in the media. So, which do you want to be?

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