Guardian readers more influential than those of other papers, says, err, The Guardian

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

I just receieved some spam an email from the folks in the Guardian’s ads department about their research project Word of Mouth (not to be confused with the Guardian’s excellent food blog, also called Word of Mouth).

This looks at the power of what we in government comms call advocacy.

“We have been researching influence, idea propagation and word of mouth. Through an extensive, multi-discipline programme of methodologies we have established what traits and abilities make one person more influential than another and have created a framework through which to identify them.”

Well, the research isn’t exactly rock solid, comprising a few interviews and a reading list which wouldn’t pass in an undergrad dissertation.

“Weak Ties, Bridging Capital and the Status Bargain are the core of what makes a person influential. When combined these factors allow people to access and spread ideas and opinions faster and more persuasively than others…”

(Those of us with academic backgrounds in social sciences will vaguely remember this from half-forgotten lectures on Bourdieu and the like).

“Having an abundance of Weak Ties gives an individual access to new sources of information and the ability to spread that information. Bridging Capital enables them to package this information up in a way that makes it easier for other people to take it on board. And the Status Bargain helps them to make more informed and influential recommendations based on a range of opinions.

“Underpinning these three concepts is a set of measurable characteristics (known by the acronym ACTIVE) which are evident in higher incidence among influential people. They are: Ahead in Adoption, Connected, Traveller, Information Hungry, Vocal and Exposed to Media.

“Our research has proven that these qualities are prominent in individuals that others would characterise as ‘influential’ and that readers of the Guardian and Observer (both online and offline) score more highly against these characteristics than consumers of other media. They demonstrate a greater propensity to both generate and spread word of mouth.”

So what they’re saying is that Guardian readers are more influential than those of other quality dailies. They consume more media, but they also produce more, and have more conversations with more people than your Average Joe. Persuade a Guardian reader, and they’ll persuade others for you. Bingo.

The research might be a little lightweight, but on the other hand I find the conclusion absolutely believable. The Guardian is read by almost everyone at management level in the public sector and in the media. It’s the paper of choice for captains of the cultural industries, for instance, individuals who by definition are highly connected. Do a straw poll on Twitter, and I strongly suspect you’ll find the Guardian or its site are read by more than any other paper.

Advocacy is an enormously powerful communication medium, but one that communicators are struggling get to grips with (in part because, by definition, it can work against you as well as for you).

At the same time, internet advertising is fast moving away from the old sheepdipping approach to a more mature, targeted and focussed model based on customer insight. The idea of targeting your adverts with the express purpose of persuading others to advocate for you is an interesting one, but one that needs further and more robust research than what’s presented here.

Interesting start, though. What do you think?

Falling trust in institutions: what does it mean for communicators?

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Each January PR and marketing giant Edelman publish an annual Trust Barometer. It’s useful reading for communicators in all disciplines, as a temperature check on who and what people trust.

2009’s Trust Barometer – the result of a survey conducted across 20 countries – found trust in institutions had fallen to an all-time low, with 62 per cent saying they trusted businesses less this year than last.

The Trust Barometer shows strong connections between trust in a brand and willingness to advocate it to others; 77 per cent said they’d criticise the products or services of a business they did not trust to friends or colleagues. This presents a real challenge for communicators, tasked with restoring the public’s faith and re-building trust.

After six months that have seen banking bail-outs, widespread job losses and the MPs expenses scandal, Edelman decided to break with tradition and conduct a mid-year survey to see how the picture has changed since the winter. Their mid-year trust report update, published today, shows some encouraging ‘green shoots’ in the picture across six of the countries surveyed last December – the USA, the UK, France, Germany, India and China.

What’s unusual is that trust in business and in government are both heading in the same direction. This is in direct contrast to earlier surveys, which have shows them moving in opposite direction – with trust in government high when trust in business is low, and vice versa.

However, while in five of the countries surveyed trust in government and in business is growing, the opposite is true in the UK. Here trust in government has fallen by 2% since January (unsurprisingly, given it was conducted at the height of the expenses scandal), with trust in business falling by the same amount.

Responses to the question ‘How much do you trust the following institutions to do what is right?’ were especially interesting. Here in the UK, 44% trust business, 38% trust the government, but just 28% trust the media to do what’s right.

That’s quite an alarming, but confusing, statistic. The media are posited as the fourth estate in our democratic system; their role, it is suggested, is to hold public institutions to account on behalf of the public. Yet less than a third of people believe they do the right thing. So it appears that the public simultaneously believe the media when it is critical while at the same time being cynical about the media itself.

Moving on, the survey looks at what actions a company could take to rebuild trust. Number one on the list is “treat employees well”, with 94% of respondents agreeing. Coming in at number 4, with 91% agreement, is “communicate frequently and honestly”. This reinforces the findings of the MacLeod Review published this month, which emphasised the role of employee engagement in helping to rebuild the economy.

However, as communicators we are not immune from falling trust in institutions, including our own. The changing trust landscape means that we communicators need to think about audiences’ faith in the information we provide. If faith in businesses and other organisations is falling, does it follow that faith in our corporately-provided information is falling too? It seems to me there’s a need for more research in this area, particularly on the impact of falling trust in institutions on internal audiences.

If trust in corporate internal communications channels is falling, then we need to identify and work with those sources our audiences do trust. For instance, Edelman’s more detailed annual barometer out in January found that people trust and are highly influenced by their peers. Internal communicators could respond to this by placing a renewed emphasis on peer-to-peer or ‘viral’ communication.

Although there are some green shoots of recovery in the housing market, many experts are predicting unemployment will continue to rise throughout 2009. The public sector in particular is likely to see increasingly squeezed budgets for many years to come, which has obvious implications for employee engagement, and new challenges for public sector communicators.

As ever, Edelman’s survey provides some useful insights for those of us working in communications and engagement. It’ll be interesting to see how much the picture has changed in January 2010.

Join the conversation about trust on Twitter at @Edelman_Trust and follow the conversation with the hashtag #edeltrust.

Decline of local news may allow corruption in public institutions to grow, Guardian editor warns

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, this week said local news needed to be supported, or “corruption and inefficiency” would grow as scrutiny lessened.

Rusbridger backs a plan to give public funding to Britain’s national press agency to allow it to provide news from public authorities and courts as local newspapers withdraw because they can no longer afford it.

But this overlooks the key issue; local news is already failing to scrutinise local democracy, with news sidelined in favour of advertorial and churnalism. Making council and court news available will not make it of interest to profit-driven local papers. The decline of local news is the result of proprietors who for decades have merged titles, cut staffing levels and reduced the actual news content in search of astronomical 40% profits.

Council freesheets have, for the most part, stepped in to fill the news vacuum in areas poorly-served for local news. This is especially true in poorer areas, which present a poorer target for advertisers and as such often get no local news at all.

This is certainly the case where I work. As well as cutting newsroom staff, distribution has been streamlined so less-well-off areas only get a paper one week in three.

The solution, though, is not to artificially prop up the local newspaper industry, but to recognise that the era of the local parish pump journalist is over. The emergence of things like Talk About Local, which trains activists to produce their own hyper-local websites, means people who genuinely care about the local area can produce, collate and comment on their local news themselves. A similar initiative by the Young Foundation launches later this year.

The result of years of under-investment in local newspapers means that with a few exceptions they’re made up largely of press releases, printed almost word-for-word. As a council communicator, this suits me pretty well, but it’s hardly indicative of a healthy local press performing its normative function as the fourth estate in a democratic system of checks and balances.

As more councils and other organisations send out their press releases using RSS, you can – if you really want – read and analyse them yourself. So do we really need traditional newspaper journalists to dissect them for us?

Many local blogs, such as Kings Cross Environment, have a higher readership than many traditional news outlets in their local area. So what were seeing, then, is not simply the decline of local news, but its democratisation, with the future of local news and comment in the hands of people who simply seek information, not profit.