Op-ed - Written Wednesday, February 10, 2010 by Denis Hancock - 2 Comments

Why I don’t trust the AdAge article about consumer trust

A couple of days ago Ad Age published an article entitled “In the age of friending, consumers trust their friends less.” The main finding that they presented, in the sub-title, was “Edelman study shows that only 25% of people find peers credible, flying in the face of social media wisdom.” It’s a provocative statement, and that’s likely why it was used – to draw people into the article. But my initial read on the findings, and how they are interpreted, leads me to not trust the message being sent.

The first clue that something is off comes from the chart they provided. True, when asked whom do you trust as a credible source of information about a company, friends / peers dropped from 45% to 25% (from 2008 to 2010). However, trust in other sources – TV news, radio news, and newspapers – dropped by almost the exact same proportion, from almost the exact same base (i.e. newspapers appear to have dropped from 46% to 26%, for example). The article gets around to mentioning this, but not until the main message they are trying to send has been established.

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