The year was 1999, The Matrix had left us perplexed, The Blair Witch Project had given us nightmares, we kept singing Baby One More Time and we wondered “what in heaven’s name is Hi-5 for?” Back in those days, social media was only seeing the light of day, soon Hi-5 would be replaced by MySpace and MySpace for Facebook; since them we have never questioned social media, until now.
The public relations agency Edelman makes a poll every year to measure trust on the audience of different industries. This year social media was polled and the results were less than great.
The revenge of traditional media
The first thing that caught our attention was that people trust more in TV, radio and papers rather than social media. In average, 41% of the users trust the data they find on social networks. In countries such as Brazil, China and India the general population trusts social media, while in places like the US, Canada and Germany trust doesn’t even reach the 40%. In general, traditional media has a 66% of user trust which has seen a recent growth along with search engines that see a 63% of the public’s coveted trust.
Social media as the gateway to emotional ties
The report continues to describe that social media is where consumers go to discover and fall in love with brands, even people who go online once a week or less reinforcing the idea that brands can create very strong emotional bonds through engagement; however, in a third position it was reported that social media is also where users go to fall out of love with the brands. 39% say “I am unlikely to become emotionally attached to a brand unless we are interacting and communicating via social media”. In the US barely a 30% agrees with this sentence, while India and China stay around the 50% mark. At the same time, 47% of people between 18 and 34 years old agree that social media are necessary to connect emotionally with brands.
The center of the problem: lack of courtesy in the media
Where do we stand? What is it that makes social media untrustworthy? A couple of weeks ago the alt-right communicator Alex Jones was banned from Facebook, Apple and Google due to hate speech and disrespect of many groups of people; Twitter was punched many times by a vortex of scandals after the american elections and just this year, Facebook saw its worst moment in front of the US Congress on account of the terrible handling of user data. All this has led to only the 40% of the world population to think that social media handle well fake news and hate speech; to note, in the UK it’s only the 28% and in the US the 34%. The general public is very displeased with social media in general with the 71% of users assuring that scams have damaged their experience on the web and 69% has been deeply affected by cyberbullying.
This data must be kept inside of our creative minds at all times, since this could be reflected on brands and; depending on how we handle it, could result either in great social media crisis or in success stories for our brands and products. If information is power, this report and its insights can give us the power to prepare for what’s coming next year.
Sources
www.forbes.com
www.edelman.com