A whopping 75% of consumers don’t believe their peers will give them good advice or information about a company, according to Edelman's latest trust barometer. Last year that number was 55%.
Yet at the same time activity on social networks such as Facebook shows little sign of slowing. What are marketers to make of these two distinct but conflicting trends - especially as more brands are devoting a greater portion of their online advertising budgets to social media, according to eConsultancy.
Say It Again and Again
Outside events can account for some of the eroding trust in peers, according to Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman. "The events of the last 18 months have scarred people," he said. (via Advertising Age).
The solution for marketers, he said, is to saturate. Consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it, he says. "That means experts as well as peers or company employees. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that's good, but they need to understand it's not a single-source solution. It's a piece of the solution."
A New Definition of Peer
Also consider that social networking is changing the definition of 'peer', according to Jesse Stanchak at SmartBlog on Social Media.
"It’s not like my old roommate stopped being trustworthy just because I developed a lot of other meaningless ties," Stanchak writes. I’m 'friends' with an ex-girlfriend's best friend’s little sister on Facebook. She's part of my social circle on paper - but her opinion about a new movie would mean absolutely nothing to me. The problem isn't just that I’m skeptical of her judgment. It's that she has no idea what kind of movies I like."
Stanchak's advice to marketers is not to take the relationships on social networks all that seriously. He talks to the person whose opinion on movies he most trusts, his former roommate, via instant message - not Facebook. "As far as Facebook knows, he isn't any more important to me than any of my other friends. My social graph is filled with little contradictions like this."
The Irony
The irony of all this is that while consumers appear to be taking these relationships less and less seriously there are some companies that are placing such importance in them that they are using the data to make business decisions. One example is a firm called Rapleaf, which is using social data - namely who people's friends are online - to help lenders determine whether that person is a good risk.
"Who you hang around with has empirical implications with how you behave," says Joel Jewitt, Rapleaf's vice president of business development. "This is a new type of information. It's still an evolving science, but the results have been positive." (via Fast Company).
