Category: news

You can trust us; we’re bloggers, not journalists or marketers

Online readers trust bloggers more than they do journalists, the mainstream media or traditional marketers, according to this Advertising Age article.

One of the big reasons blogs have such impact is their credibility among readers. In a February poll from We Media and Zogby Interactive, 72% of adults said they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today. Another 55% said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism, and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role, according to the poll.

Consumers are also taking bloggers’ word before they buy. A late 2006 Ipsos MORI survey found that blogs were a more trusted source of information than advertising or e-mail marketing. One-third of respondents said they had decided not to buy a product after reading a negative blog post, while 52% were persuaded to buy after reading a positive review.

Ad Age also links to an interesting demographic profile (PDF) of bloggers that should help advertisers hone their pitches to us. For instance, 59 percent of us floss daily and 63 percent never go to church.

Story via AdPulp (here).

Friday Five: clearing the cache edition

Cleaning out some starred items from the RSS reader:

  1. Michael Stoner wonders: Who listens to podcasts, anyway? Good question. And Stoner sort of answers.
  2. A university gets possessive. Via University Business, the Boston Globe reports on Boston University President Bob Brown’s “test-driving” of a new slogan for the campus: “Boston’s University.” It sounds like Brown has convinced Globe columnist Alex Beam, anyway. The tagline “removes two of BU’s outsized competitors — Cambridge-based Harvard and MIT — from the mix entirely. Boston College, its name notwithstanding, huddles in the shady groves of Newton. Both US News & World Report and Washington Monthly rank BU well above Northeastern University, the only other claimant for the title. So ‘Boston’s University’ it is.”
  3. Facebook vs. MySpace (video). A nice parody of those Mac vs. PC TV ads, from CNET.
  4. Paging Joseph Campbell: Tired of those Internet “trolls” who crash your forums with inane or inflammatory comments? You may as well despise the court jester! Via Boing Boing comes word that the troll is nothing more than the archetypical trickster of our mythology, who enter our online discussions with “the cracked, stoic smile of Robin Goodfellow, a Puck with the simple desire to disrupt peace itself.” If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended.
  5. From the effective keywords department: ‘Distance learning’ breaks out. Bob Johnson discusses how “a relatively rare example of academic jargon moving out into common use.”