Forrester Research has released a report which finds that people do not trust corporate blogs –
which rank below newpapers, portals, wikis, direct mail, company email and message board posts in the trustworthiness stakes. Josh Bernoff, the report author, posts details about the methodology and findings, saying:

Make no mistake. This is not a plea to give up on blogging.

It is a plea to be thoughtful in how and why you blog.

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb has some reservations about the report:

“The Forrester report in the end is a little unsatisfactory. Trust has to be earned and some corporations are actively making the effort to do that. As a result, there are some corporate blogs that you trust more than others. To claim that corporate blogs are the least trustworthy information source on the planet seems unfair – and untrue in many cases. This is one instance where the stats don’t tell the full story, in our view.”

The Blog Council responds with a list of the company blogs they consider trustworthy, while Bernoff’s fellow Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang thinks the data only confirms what we already knew:

“Corporate blogs, like Jonathan Schwartz Blog and Bob Lutz of GM frequently talk about one thing –they’re (sic) 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.”

Tracking anti-social media PR in the UK
More evidence of social media’s self-referentialism comes from Stephen Waddington at Rainier PR, who highlights an interesting influencer map of the UK PR community on Twitter developed by Tim Hoang‘s team at Porter Novelli, using Waddngton’s own top 50 list of PR people on Twitter as its input.

Wadds says:

“The map is incredibly dense and centred around a core. It shows that we’re all talking to each other, but aren’t reaching out to other communities.

“There is an important lesson here. The PR community is having lots of conversations, but with each other. We’re all telling each other how great we are, reinforcing our own propaganda, when we really need to reach out to other audiences and communities.”

The year that was according to Google Zeitgeist
It’s that time again, when media pundits cast their contemplative eye over the events of the year gone by and attempt to prognosticate what might be worth paying attention to in the year to come. A very good place to start is of course, Google’s Zeitgeist, which will give you an idea of what audiences are likely to have an appetite for. The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss trawls through the UK-specific Zeitgeist so you don’t have to:

This year’s UK zeitgeist looks good for the BBC – iPlayer is the fastest growing search term of the year, ahead of Facebook, iPhone, YouTube, Yahoo Mail, the Large Hadron Collider and Obama. Not bad going at all for a brand that only launched fully on Christmas Day 2007.