Edelman Trust Barometer 2012 says trust in social media is up

The latest installement of the Edelman Trust Barometer has now been published and as usual, it is interesting reading. This year, there have been some dramatic changes in the views of the public in most of the countries surveyed. Trust in government, business and NGO’s is declining while trust in media is rising.

Trust in government shows an exceptionally sharp drop in the 2012 Barometer, after rising steadily for four years. In Sweden (“informed public”), trust in government is quite stable, dropping only from 64% to 62%, making Sweden the market with the fourth highest level of trust in government. Trust in business is also decreasing, although in Sweden it is acutally up from 52% to 54%, possibly thanks to the relatively stable Swedish economy compared to many other countries.

If we look at different media sources, it is interesting to see the dramatic increase in trust in social media, now almost at the same level as corporate information. Note: responses are for “informed public”, i.e. college educated, high income, high media consumption.

edelman-trust-barometer-2012

Overall, there is a huge drop in trust for CEO’s while trust in pers such as regular employees and “a person like yourself” is increasing dramatically.

edelman-trust-2012-peers

In other words, there is less trust in messages communicated by CEO’s through traditional corporate channels and increased trust in messages from our peers, communicated through for example social media channels. There’s a lot more to read and you’ll find the whole presentation here below.


Four Swedish PR agencies on Holmes Report’s Top 250 Global Rankings

The Holmes Report has just published its Top 250 Global Rankings of the world’s leading PR agencies. Edelman moves ut two spots to claim the number one position this year at the expense of Weber Shandwick. Fleishman-Hillard drops one place from second to third this year.

Four Swedish based PR agencies are among the 250 top agencies on the list. KREAB Gavin Anderson drops one spot from 20 to 21, Prime International is ranked 49 (up from 52), Hallvarsson & Halvarsson is at 56 (56) and Diplomat PR at 159 (171).

Norwegian agency Geelmuyden.Kiese drops to 87 (78) and Pohjoisranta in Finland drops to 165 (117).

Full list in pdf.

 

In me we trust

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2006, global opinion leaders say their most credible source of information about a company is now “a person like me”.

In the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today. Opinion leaders also consider rank-and-file employees more credible spokespersons than corporate CEOs (42% vs. 28% in the U.S.).

Also interesting is that trust in government is low in the U.S. (38%) but high in China (83%, up from 63% in ’05).