Thought Leadership

Public Relations - Trust

Trust: The Most Important Currency in the Future of PR?

Trust and PR? People looking at our industry from the outside will shake their heads and claim that they don't go together. Spin doctors are the opposite of trustful resources. Expect them to distract, interrupt, bait or persuade, but don't trust them!

As a PR practitioner, you might disagree with equal force. After all, hasn't our business always been about trusted relationships with reporters? If we don't earn their trust by repeatedly delivering valuable information, they won't listen to us, and we can't do our jobs. Also, what about our clients? If they don't trust us, they won't work with us for long. PR is really all about trust, isn't it?

We have lived with this contradiction for a considerable time, and we had a black sheep solution for it. We put the blame on ruthless flacks or on unguided freshmen who didn't know what they were doing. We believed, though, that those adhering to high industry standards could become the trusted advisors of their clients' chiefs and at the same time be honest advocates appreciated by the media.

While we still might have some black sheep, they are the smaller problem. The bigger problem is where the herd is going. Some perspective on this:

The End of the Megaphone
Public relations and marketing as disciplines have suffered from a significant decline in trust. Yankelovich Partners, a leading market researcher, provided evidence of this decline in their 2005 marketing receptivity study, which showed the most important reason for people's resistance to marketing is the level of saturation and intrusiveness they experience.

People feel interrupted and overloaded by marketing messages. For too long, communicators have followed the megaphone principle. They turned up the volume and hoped to drown the competition out, but this just increased the overall noise for the audience. Today, recipients of business communications want to see more relevance, and would like more control on what they get. The megaphone strategy is unraveling because recipients have the technological power to enforce their expectations. More importantly, people have developed a social dynamic that makes them want to enforce their right to drown out the noise.

Communities of Trust
We are living more individualized lives that are not as regulated by public institutions as they were for previous generations. As a result, people are building trust in new ways. They have less trust in established public institutions like governments or brands. Even personal advisors like doctors or lawyers are less trusted. Instead they increasingly build trust with people who share an interest with them: their peers. In summary, we have more confidence in each other than in institutions. Most of us will be able to confirm this anecdotally, but there are also studies such as Yankelovich Partners' or Edelman's annual trust survey that proves this is happening.

Let's look at an example. While our grandparents would have typically followed the advice of their doctor without asking any questions, we not only call for a second opinion, but we also seek someone else who suffers from the same disease before we undergo that surgery. Aiding this social dynamic are new technologies that actually empower us to find our peers. We can use search engines to locate someone else with that same rare disease who lives on the other side of the planet.

The same dynamic is true for all aspects of our lives, as well as the products we use. Any group of people who share an interest in what a company does or stands for can easily connect through the internet and share their views by electronic word of mouth. They can do this on a growing number of new media platforms like blogs, wikis, social networks or even in a virtual world such as Second Life. These communities of interest can include customers, employees, media, analysts, partners or members of any other traditional audience, each of them a potential source of trust or distrust between the other. These communities of trust are accordingly increasingly shaping the communications environment of companies we work for.

If we want to help businesses to establish trust in such an environment, we need to make sure that we address all sources of trust in this community and do that in a relevant, integrated and interactive way. Obviously, this has many ramifications for the way we communicate, but let's keep our focus on the issue of trust.

From Coverage to Action
Megaphone marketing has not only lost trust with its audiences, but also with the people who pay for it. The infamous ROI is upon us! Getting coverage and reach are not enough when you are always suspicious that your audience probably won't listen to the messages you pushed out. How can we re-establish the trust with business leaders that we are actually supporting their business in a tangible way?

As is often the way these days, it is helpful to take a closer look at Google. The company is attracting increasing amounts of money from marketers because they are offering more than coverage. You only pay for the small advertising spots that Google sells if someone clicks on them, which means you know if your investment has had a measurable impact. Can we emulate something like this in PR? If trust is built from peer to peer within communities of interest, is there a way to quantify this web of influence?

Management consultant Fred Reichheld suggested that there is ultimately one question to pose to customers and other constituencies that will allow you to measure the success of your business. "Would you recommend this company or product to a friend or colleague?" It is a question that reflects the way trust is being built from peer to peer and measures the willingness to act. And most important, it is a query that puts the finger on the pulse of your business. Reichheld proved with extensive research that you will impressively grow sales for your business when you are able to increase the number of people who want to recommend what you do.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we should do! PR is about trusted relationships. We need to understand how to build it from ear to ear rather than through the megaphone. We then make the leap from coverage to action. Trust will be the most important issue in the future of PR and therefore should become its most important currency.

For more information, contact Ken Peters in Text 100's Boston office.