Social media vs. traditional media: A trust issue

By a lot of PR practitioners social media, is seen as this fantastical new tool that will trump all traditional media when it comes to getting your message out. In their book "Online Public Relations", David Phillips and Philip Young goes as far as claiming that "everything will change" now that we have social media. 

Trust takes time

Recent research indicates that most people might not agree, at least not yet, with that assessment.



Public relations as all about building relationships and creating (good) reputations. An important aspect of both, is trust. Bombarding your stakeholders with your message will not achieve anything unless the stakeholders trust the information.

Not unexpectedly Edelman Trust Barometer shows that different sources have different levels of trust. Most trusted are academics and "experts", and at the other end of the scale we find employees, government officials and CEOs. The advantage of third party endorsement is in other words still alive and kicking.

Another piece of research that is even more interesting when it comes to the topic of social media and traditional media, is that where the source is delivering his message is also of great importance.

While there are many good reasons for getting your messages out through social media, it appears that creating trust should not be high on that list. Social Media is the second-to-last media platform, beaten only by advertisement when it comes to not being trusted.

Traditional media, and those who work for them, often show up on lists like these of untrustworthy sources. But this recent research shows that they are still more trusted than information we get from social media. My teacher, Pam Williams, mentioned an article she read where it said that while people might have gotten a piece of news first on Twitter or Facebook, they wouldn't trust it until they saw it confirmed in traditional media.

Choose your media platform

If you’re looking to traditional media to make sure your message is trusted, it’s also useful to realize that some traditional media is more trusted than others.

Business magazines are at number two, only beaten by stock or industry analyst rapports. We then find radio at number four, TV at number six and newspapers down at number eight.

I’m not sure why people perceive newspaper journalists less trustworthy than their colleagues on the radio, but I will guess that in Britain the BBC might have something to do with it, as one of the most trusted media institutions in the country. Radio (and also TV) is perhaps seen as a more sombre medium than newspapers with their tabloid shenanigans.

Readers build relationships with newspapers, radio programmes and TV News for years. It's no wonder they tend to trust them more than a new media outlet.

For PR practitioners the lesson is that not everything that glimmers is gold. Just because social media is new and shiny and exciting, doesn’t mean that we should completely turn our backs on traditional approaches. I think the best practice is to combine the two, and to find out in which situations we should chose social media and in which situations we should go with traditional media.

Here is another piece of research from 2008 that suggests that spending a lot of time on corporate blogs, might not be worth it…