Trust and the Sphere of Public Engagement

Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer has studied Trust closely for the best part of a decade. Since the Battle of Seattle in 1999, we can observe fluctuating reputation fortunes for Business across the globe; a compelling and continued rise of authority for NGOs; Trust discounts for US firms abroad – especially post-Iraq – and equal discounts for Governments and their authority as the geo-political landscape itself has become more complex and more inter-dependent.

Above all else over the past decade, we have seen Trust in “People Like Me” on an inexorable rise. People are more trusting in their peers than in anyone else. This has of course coincided with the Digital Revolution which has, in turn, fuelled the Citizen Renaissance. Both Power and the vesting of Trust have returned to We, The People.

Spokesperson Credibility

Today’s companies/ brands being closer to the Citizen brings immediate and compelling advantages

We no longer live in an era of top-down Communications. It all used to be ever-so-simple. Controlled messages – whether through the 30 second ad spot or the Command & Control method of PR – used to be delivered to believing and unsuspecting audiences, whose Trust in authority was undimmed by the emergent transparency that the Digital Democracy subsequently brought. Companies, Brands, Politicians – even the medical profession – all had never had it so easy. The People were at best innocent; at worse, submissive. In the US, it helped build mega-brands from the ’50s and ’60s onwards. In the UK, Command & Control reached its zenith with the arrival of New Labour in Government in 1997. Yet, as Michael Wilmott argues in Citizen Brands, today’s companies/ brands being closer to the Citizen brings immediate and compelling advantages: it serves as an early warning system; it is more likely to engender positive Word of Mouth; and it is altogether stickier in “an ever more volatile Consumer world”.

The Communications industry faces probably the most fundamental upheaval since the introduction of either the television or the mobile phone.

Peer-To-Peer communication has changed both the nature of Communications and the dynamics of Trust. Even before the explosion of Social Networking (with sites for all ages and all communities – serious and seriously frivolous alike), a new horizontal axis of Communications generated a new sweet spot, within which only authentic Communications can now properly exist. Communications outside this sweet spot can for evermore only be partial. Dialogue outside the sweet spot will be incomplete and lack both authenticity and authority. And such partial dialogue is simply not acceptable within a Conversation Economy. The people will reject it. Any Government, Business or Brand which ignores this can only see its levels of Citizen and Consumer Trust eroded faster and further.

Source: Edelman

Source: Edelman

If the sweet spot at the junction of the vertical and horizontal axes explains the changing shape of Communications, so the Sphere of Public Engagement provides both the context and the content. The overlay of these two forces is now a Communications imperative and its implications will come to represent probably the most fundamental upheaval in the Communications industry since the introduction of either the television or the mobile phone.

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