Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.
– Gregg Easterbrook

The blogosphere was baffled again late yesterday with statistics coming out of that venerable research firm Forrester. This time, bloggers took the hit as their communication tools showed up on the very bottom of the list of trusted information sources. It turns out, the people surveyed trusted personal email almost five times as much as they trust corporate blogs. Hell, they trusted message board posts more than corporate blogs! The numbers, as Josh Bernoff himself commented, are bleak:

We examined these results further. Among people who regularly read blogs (at least once a month), 24% trust company blogs. Among people who blog themselves, 39% trust them. These are low numbers any way you slice it.

This isn’t the first time that Forrester has issued some rather surprising and depressing statistics. Back in October, the company declared that only 11 percent of consumers are using RSS.

Now I’m not about to argue that Forrester is wrong. I’m pretty confident that these numbers are accurate. But we need to sit down, take a deep breath, and figure out exactly what Forrester is measuring.

In the case of the much touted RSS statistic, I’ll quote Mashable:

You can’t ask mainstream users whether or not they use RSS in their daily course of Internet usage any more than you can ask the average couch potato whether or not they use Cathode Ray Tubes or Liquid Crystal Displays.

The truth is that it’s pretty difficult to hit a website these days that doesn’t use RSS in some way, shape or fashion. If you look at the average page here on Mashable, there are about two or three sections which rely on RSS to pull in information relevant to the readers. If you turn your attention to the most popular sites on the web, sites like Facebook, MySpace and Google all have syndicated content strewn all through them.

While only 12 percent fessed up to not knowing what RSS was, I’ll bet the number of clueless consumers is significantly higher–one indication of that was the 45% who were “neither disinterested or interested in using RSS in the future.”

Let’s see what one expert has to say about this kind of use of statistics:

(Was Scott Adams inspired by the Forrester report? Probably not–he writes his strips a few weeks in advance.)

I enjoyed what Dwight Silverman had to say about the “Luddite” crowd of social media naysayers–of course, he was speaking of folks that were at least savvy enough to figure out how to comment on his blog posts.

So let’s come back to how Forrester conducted its most recent survey. Josh Bernoff took great care to qualify the data as much as possible in describing the methods and the limitations of the survey (emphasis his):

A note about how we collect data. The data comes from an online survey we conducted in Q2 of this year. Our online panel is as representative as we can make if of the US online adult population (18 and older). Companies use our data all the time, and I believe it’s the best available survey of its kind; we’ve been conducting surveying consumers since 1997. In this case, we surveyed over 5000 people. We asked them to rate how much they trust information sources on a five-point scale, from 1 (don’t trust at all) to 5 (trust completely). Respondents could also answer that they didn’t use a particular information source. In this case about 80% of those we polled said they did use corporate blogs. Of those who used them, only 16% rated them 4 or 5 on the five-point trust scale.

Re-read those last two sentences, and re-think your conclusions. Step down off the ledge, and read some of Josh’s own advice:

This means that if you blog, your goal should be to create a blog about which people say “I like that – I don’t think of it as a company blog.” For the most part, that’s a hurdle you need to jump to gain their trust. I don’t mean to hide who is writing the blog. I mean it has to be more about your customers than it is about you.

Blogs exclusively about companies and products are what I think generate these low trust ratings. So don’t do a blog like that.

Did you take these recent surveys with a grain of salt?

1. Don’t get caught snoozing. Marketers, you may get the weekends off, but bloggers don’t have that luxury. In fact, often their busiest times are the weekend. You need to have alerts set up about your brand’s presence in the blogosphere (and on social networks), and be prepared to respond quickly when they’re triggered. The folks at McNEIL-PPC were caught snoozing while their Motrin brand was circling the drain one weekend after a new marketing campaign offended the mommyblogger crowd and all hell broke loose on Twitter. They had no backup plan in place, no dark website ready to light up, and ended up taking the site down for more than a day while they figured out what to do.
2. Don’t be afraid to apologize. The good news is that the Motrin folks apologized. The bad news is it took them too long. When Matt Bacak’s over-the-top press release got him a great deal of negative attention on Twitter last week, he wasn’t afraid to apologize and admit his mistakes. While it took him longer that most of us would’ve liked, he certainly responded faster than the Motrin folks, or some of the old school horror stories like Kryptonite.
3. Take your campaign door-to-door. Another very smart thing that Matt did was respond directly to each Twitter (and a lot of the bloggers) who had called him out (he responded to my tweets, and even agreed to get a picture taken of him wearing the shirt I made him) but I’m still waiting for him to chime in on one of my blog posts).
4. Silence is deadly; you cannot not communicate. This is communications 101, folks: silence speaks volumes. In my old days as a social media consultant for a PR agency, a client approached us that had been called out for astroturfing. Apparently some well-intentioned junior marketing folks thought it was a good idea to reply to a negative post about their company and defend the product. They did so anonymously, representing themselves as users. The blogger smelled something fishy, checked the IP addresses and called them on it in an even bigger and more negative post. They asked us if they should respond. I said it depends on how influential the blogger is. Turns out, his blog post was on page one of Google searches for their name. That’s influence, my friends, even if you’ve never head of this blogger before. So I encouraged them to respond, and execute on an SEO campaign. They never responded, but they at least got the SEO campaign going.
5. Don’t fake it. You’ll get caught. My client did. Coke got caught, and so did Sony and Wal-Mart.
6. Don’t be afraid of controversy. Do you have a crazy but incredibly brilliant person in your office who may not always walk the company line, but who’s also very smart about your product, or one application of your product? Don’t keep that person chained up in the basement like another client of mine did—I guarantee they’ll get a readership. Why? Because crazy is authentic. Nobody talks like marketers do. Be real. Let the guy do three posts about your product and one post about Japanese sword fighting and its relevance to cloud computing (don’t know where that one came from).
7. Lawsuits are great publicity—for the people being sued. Think twice before you send that Cease and Desist letter. A former client got one from Apple and got tons of (overall incredibly positive) publicity around it. When T-Mobile’s parent company threatened to sue Engadget over its use of the color magenta, all hell broke loose online. Guess who came out looking like the loser?
8. Staff up. When Target became the target of a blogger’s ire, their response landed them in the New York Times, and not in a positive light. Why did they diss this blogger? Because, ultimately, they complained that they just weren’t staffed to deal with responding to every blog query. Folks, pony up the dough to get a few social-media savvy people on your marketing and customer service teams. Comcast did, and they’re now the heroes of corporate social media responsibility. Worth every penny!
9. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Have an outspoken critic? Bring them into the fold. Don’t ignore them—they’re passionate and will probably keep on blogging. Don’t sue them—that just gives them more to blog about. Reach out to them on a personal level, invite them into your organization to understand how things work. Your most outspoken critics can also be your biggest advocates—get them to think about you differently, and you’ve turned a critic into an ambassador… Or at least quieted them down a bit!

My presentation was broken up into roughly three parts:

1. What NOT to do. Check out my Delicious “pitching” tag for all the links I mentioned in this section.
2. How to do it the RIGHT way. I gave a few examples, including (all past or current Topaz clients)
1. Tubes — yes we took FULL advantage of the now disgraced senator from Alaska;
2. Podcast Ready — getting sued by Apple can be a good thing if you’ve got some guts to complain about it; and
3. Scuderi
3. The four big buckets of blog marketing, which are (I’m reordering them here):
1. Search. How do you optimize how people interested in relevant topics find you?
2. Feed. Once they find you, how do you optimize the many ways they receive your content?
3. Interactivity. Once they’re reading your content, how do you optimize the many ways in which they can engage with you?
4. Buzz. Once they’re engaged with you, how do you optimize the many ways they can attract others to your content?

Here’s the presentation (the background noise gets better as the evening progresses):

Watch Todd’s Preso

Thanks to Chel and Adam for putting this on and inviting me to speak to the great little group! Be sure to sign up for future events!