Blogging, Fear and Meerkats

So, one year into ‘The Blog’ and I’m still, just about, maintaining it. A year’s worth of integration, data, trends, recession, trust, social media, online brands, and a bit of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Cicero, singing kittens, pancakes, suicide and a new agency (Weapon7). Hmm.

This started out as a personal online library documenting interesting, but currently useless, things in the hope that they may be of use at a later date. If I’m honest, it’s actually become more of a mini project on the side supported by a constant little voice in the back of my head telling me to ‘do something good’. It’s debatable whether I’ve managed it or not but it has certainly got me thinking.

I definitely enjoy writing my blog, but I still don’t think I’m comfortable with it all yet. Clicking ‘Publish Post’ is still accompanied by that same millisecond of panic usually associated with the realisation that I’ve sent my ‘funny mail’ to the wrong Chris (why must Outlook insist on putting his name first anyway?). The difference with this is that the panic is constantly fuelled by the fear that somebody may actually read the splurge I inconsiderately fling across my own little piece of the World Wide Web. I know I’m being paranoid but Jesus, what if I’ve missed an apostrophe?!

With this in mind I’m not going to bother trying to sound smart or all wannabe plannery for this one. Instead, here’s something that made me chuckle. It’s a new campaign promoting comparethemarket.com using Meerkats.

CompareTheMeerkat.com

I don’t know what it is about animals and banks that tickle me (like here) but this made me smile. Given the current economic climate I quite enjoyed watching Meerkats go spelunking in Pakistan and knitting in Nairobi whilst I was perusing the merits of variable mortgage rates vs fixed.

More importantly, it’s managed to get comparethemarket.com imprinted in my mind where I have actively resisted these types of sites before. I was quite impressed with the size of the Meerkat site. I’d seen the TV ad but presumed that it would simply be a homepage take over but no, there’s a whole host of Meerkat fun in there. (Although it does make you wonder what people were searching for to prompt such a campaign!)

Anyways, the fear’s starting to set in. Onwards into another year before the paranoia takes hold…

Who can you trust?

I was following a debate on a football forum this Sunday (about Ronaldo’s penalty-taking style if anyone’s interested) and came across this statement:

“I'm prepared to believe respected newspapers over people posting on an Internet message board”

Although this was merely a rant from a fan whose argument was on the ropes it raises an interesting question – “Who do you trust when gathering information”. This reminded me of a 'trust chart' I came across a while back:


In the UK businesses are actually trusted more than the government (and are only trusted less then NGOs). This seemed like great news for our brands, so I decided to delve a little deeper and checked out ‘Edelman’s Trust Barometer’ (an annual trust and credibility survey amongst global opinion forming elites).

The latest edition confirmed the prominence of businesses on the ‘axis of trust’ but revealed that whilst people trusted our brands and companies, they didn’t always trust how they found out about them.

Sure, the conventional CEO statement, company employee, press, etc sources were all listed but the highest score achieved was "media" with a mere 38% (of people agreeing that it is a trustworthy source).

So who do we trust? It’s actually the third parties – industry analysts, academics and specialists, all scoring over 55%. This makes sense, with the general consensus believing that these sources are less swayed by company propaganda and are hence not as likely to “toe the party line”.

However, there is a final trusted group that beats all of these sources hands down – “people like me”. Out of those questioned across 18 different countries 58% agreed that if they heard information about a company from “somebody like me” they would find it credible.

So who are these “people like me”? Apologies to MOSAIC and Acorn but the overall opinion is that it has nothing to do with geography, local community, demographics or even a common industry. It’s actually much simpler: “people like me” are people who “share my interests”, “have similar political beliefs” and other such logical stuff.

This brings forth the old ‘social networking’ argument. Yes, we’ve been chatting about it for ages now (amongst people like ourselves) but it still holds true.

It’s understandable that brands are unwilling to relinquish control and offer themselves up to the world of social networking – “What if they only say bad stuff?” – but whether they like it or not it’s already happening. More importantly these peer-to-peer networks are proving more impactful than the millions invested each year just to paint a pretty picture of the company.

This doesn’t mean that every brand needs its own social network, more that they have to be smarter and reconsider how and where they talk to their customers. Peer-to-peer efforts need to be incorporated with big budget comms plans. Yes it’s big, scary and seems risky, but there are small steps out there. Think how Innocent gauged customer opinion before deciding whether to enter McDonald's or not. They found people like them (current customers) and asked them.

A final word of warning: if you’re reading this and nodding along thinking that maybe I’m somebody like you, think again – according to Edelman only 14% of people found us bloggers to be trustworthy!