Edelman PR recently published their latest Trust Barometer report, which details findings of their global survey on trust and credibility. I think the results are very interesting and relevant to our sector and for many of our clients.  In terms of their UK findings, there were some results which you may find surprising.   

I work on the Government & Not for Profit team here at Metrica, and so am particularly interested in how much trust the UK public places in such organisations. Perhaps contrary to what I expected there appears to have been a ‘Trust Bounce’ for Business, Media, NGO’s and Government. Significantly, trust in Government has more than doubled from 16% to 34% over the last year. This is despite recent data ‘scandals’, where various government departments have lost huge amounts of our data. This may be because Edelman focus their survey on the ‘opinion forming elite’ (mainly educated, well read, professionals, who are highly engaged in the media).

The younger generation of these ‘elite’ have been found to generally be more trusting than their older peers. They also place much more emphasis on social and environmental issues and a company’s integrity, rather than financial performance. They are ‘re-shaping the trust landscape’ and this will have to be taken into account by business and government when engaging them as an audience.

To put the UK into context, we have the lowest trust in media in comparison to all other countries in the survey with just 38% of people placing a high amount of trust in media to do what is right. People would rather trust the advice and opinions of ‘people like themselves’, which is probably why word of mouth scored very highly as a source of information.

Surprisingly though, blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace score rather low as a trusted source of information about companies. As an avid user of Facebook myself I know many people are suspicious that company profiles on these sites are a shameless way to ‘place’ themselves on the site and plant favourable comments about themselves. Some even write fake blogs posing as members of the public to appear in a more positive light to a media-savvy audience. 

Then again, am I just not ‘trusting’ my sources enough?