Forrester Report on Blogging & Trust

Forrester today released a new report on corporate blogging and trust (registration required, but free). I'm glad to see they ask, "Is a corporate blog worth doing?" Rather than just assuming that everyone should be blogging, Josh Bernoff and his co-authors actually acknowledge that some blogs are not worth the effort. Of course, that's a hard point to ignore when they report that only 16% in the survey said they trusted company blogs.

Among the tips offered:

"Honest and transparent blogs will get noticed. Those who write in a corporate voice will be ignored and ineffective. What types of blogs will consumers trust? Those that reveal tidbits about what’s going on inside the company, those that comment intelligently on customer problems and competitor products, and those that speak like people. Robert Scoble pioneered this technique at Microsoft years ago, but it’s still hard for companies to figure out."

Thanks to Steve Rubel <@steverubel> for tweeting this and Mihaela Vorvoreanu<@prprof_mv> for re-tweeting.

ZDNet series on how Fortune 500's use social media

Jennifer Leggio at ZDNet is doing a series on how Fortune 500s are using social media. Her latest entry on Newell Rubbermaid features an interview with Bert DuMars, VP of of e-business and interactive marketing.

Our strategy is to listen to our consumers first, understand how they would like to engage with us and/or how they would like us to engage with them... This has led us to start small, experiment and see what works. We then expand the particular tactic based on consumer feedback that they are receptive and that we have developed a level of trust with them in the conversation.

Applied theory: two-way conversation leads to trust as a relational outcome, which leads to more conversation. It's also analogue to social penetration theory.