Why you need someone else to be your messenger
- Wed, January 25 2012
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
Edelman’s 2012 Trust Barometer is out, and the biggest finding is the increasing stock people put in the recommendations of their peers - who surpass nonprofit staff in terms of their trustworthiness as messengers.
In speaking about this finding, David Armano of Edelman notes, it is important that we “share the stage with ‘regular’ people who have a voice via a variety of social channels,” as well as to be “in tune with the topics and issues they care about and discuss. Last year I speculated that the decline in attention given toward people like ourselves—our friends and peers may have been related to social media fatigue. This year, it’s possible that many of us who make social networking part of our digital routines have gotten a bit better at filtering the signal from noise, thereby being both more generous but focused with our finite attention spans.”
From my perspective, this is just one more piece of data illustrating the importance of third-party endorsement in all of your outreach and engagement. (More evidence is here.) You can’t be your own, only messenger. You need respected authority figures, experts and definitely, everyday champions - who are more powerful than ever.
Take two minutes and look at your latest outreach piece or your website or your organization’s Facebook page. Who is speaking for you? Where are they on the trust barometer? If it’s your CEO or ED, you may need additional voices.
(Hat tip to Caryn Stein here at Network for Good for the data!)
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Comments
Hi Katya,
I love your blog and frequently pass the information in it on to others. But since some of those others are blind, I wanted to tell you that the graph used in this blog is completely inaccessible to blind readers. JAWS, the most commonly used screen reader (synthetic speech program) doesn’t even acknowledge its existence, as it usually does with graphics. I see an increasing number of these things, and I doubt if the people who are producing and using them even think of the accessibility issue. But I think you are the sort of person who would care about the accessibility of your blog, so I thought I would pass this information on to you. I can suggest some solutions, but I don’t want to take the time of your other readers. Just e-mail me offline.
Best wishes,
Dick Davis
Thanks Dick for pointing this out. I apologize it is not accessible and encourage you to reach out to Edelman to share your recommendations on how they can better accommodate JAWS.