The Emotion Called Trust

Continuing with the thread I started in my previous post Do you trust corporate blogs, and picking up from posts on Trust by Ken Allen and Tony Karrer, I came across Chris Brogan’s post Advertising and Trust. Chris wrote in response to Jeremiah Owyang raising questions about Chris’s sponsored post for Kmart. Chris does a great job at analysing and responding. In this process I discovered many posts that talk about trust and integrity of bloggers. Two posts that caught my eye were Lucretia M. Pruitt: What is Your Time Worth? What’s Worth Your Time? and Barbara Gibson: What is your integrity worth? I don’t follow blogs of Jeremiah, Lucretia or Barbara, but I had no reason not to trust them. They have an opinion that they are sharing.

When I come across blog posts that talk about other products, I take them as opinions of those bloggers. I am a gullible guy J. However I will not necessarily take business decisions (or even personal buying decisions) based only on one or two blog posts, and I don’t think that means I don’t trust blogs. It is definitely helpful when bloggers disclose posts to be sponsored posts. I follow RWW and they talk about their sponsors all the time. They also talk about other products and I trust them to provide a balanced view in their product reviews.

An interesting thing to note in the Forrester report is that people trust emails from people they know but don’t trust as much the social networking profiles from people they know. Hmmm…