Credit: Christopher M. Dawson

The annual Edelman Trust Barometer is out, and tech journalist Tom Foreski did some digging into the findings. As Tom points out, the news isn’t good for PR agencies, “social media experts,” citizen journalists, or media companies of any kind:

• Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent.
• Trust in information from digital media–blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news, remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.
  [...]
• Trust in credibility of TV news declined by 20 points, from 44 to 24 percent
• Trust in news coverage on the radio dropped by 17 points, from 48 to 31 percent.
• Trust in newspapers fell by 14 points, from 46 to 32 percent.
• Only 38 percent trust media (as an institution) to do what is right, down from 46 percent in 2008.
• Media companies (as an industry) have declined in credibility by 16 points (from 48 to 32 percent).
• In the U.S., media companies are tied with the insurance industry for last place. Banks are second from the bottom.
• Top trusted industry is technology and it has widened its lead over other industries.
• Tied for the second most trusted industry is Biotech and Automotive at 63 percent, followed by Energy, Retail and Food at 61 percent.

Naturally, this got Tom speculating whether it was simply a case of market factors at work: the media marketplace is simply over-saturated (with everything from mainstream to social media), and that might have driven the market value through the floor. As far as the mainstream media goes, Tom also suggested that it probably has to do with how “traditional media is under pressure, with fewer resources [which] means more mistakes, less time to check sources, [and] a lower quality product.”

I think another part of what’s going on here, though, is a case of over-exposure/fatigue. I mean, we’re tapped into information all the time. We spend the majority of our time staring at glowing rectangles. Our telescreens are on steroids. And we’re getting stupider because so much of our mind share is being taking up by other people’s messages that there hardly anything left for our own thought processes.

So maybe what’s starting to happen is that our minds are pushing back. Maybe it’s an evolutionary mechanism to coax our own, independent sense-of-self into re-asserting itself. ‘Cause something tells me that trust in peers that we actually share space hasn’t dropped. These are peers who we can read when they share information with us. We can see their body language and respond to it.

Who knows? Maybe what’s making us stupider is that we interact less with people and more with machines. We are, after all, social creatures, and those social tendencies have evolved over 3 millions years of physical interaction. So maybe our brains are pushing back. Maybe they’re trying to drive us away from the media circus and back home into the company of a real tribe.

Credit: 4PIZON

Imagine what the world of advertising or public relations would be like if TV disappeared tomorrow… You see, both of these industries (along with marketing and branding) use every medium available to them to get their message across.

Well, the internet is just another medium. But while it’s just another medium, it’s also distinct from other media (print, radio, TV, etc.) in two important respects.

First, the internet is the multi-medium. In a nutshell, it allows you to feature text, audio, images, and video (the mainstays of the other media) all on page.

Second, and more importantly, it’s the multi-direction medium. It allows message to be communicated from the top-down, from the bottom-up, and from peer-peer-peer. None of the other mainstream media (N.B. the internet is pretty f**king mainstream at this point) can do that.

What this means is that the internet is a social medium. It lets brands talk to consumers, consumers talk to brands, and consumers talk to other consumers.

And it’s always been this social. Some of the earliest instances of the internet were inherently social, from IRC to chat rooms to message boards, people have been talking to masses of other people online (with all that dialogue being archived) since the beginning.

It was quite a while ago that word-of-mouth started moving from being peer-to-peer to being peer-to-peers. It’s just that only recently did it reach a sufficiently critical mass that marketers finally started to notice and realize the potential of talking with consumers instead of at them.

The thing with the internet being a mainstream, multi-directional medium, though, is that suddenly what the ad-hack does affects the spin doctor affects the salesman, because it’s all online, it’s all logged, and it’s all accessible to everyone.

This means that marketers have to take great care to ensure that their message is consistent across all channels and across all disciplines. Because if your average customer experience doesn’t reflect the public perception of your brand being touted by your public relations and advertising campaigns respectively, that inconsistency isn’t only going to be glaring, but glaringly accessible, and you’re going to look like a hack.

So in the age of so-called social media, it’s paramount that marketing departments provide clear direction to their advertising and PR people. After all, if marketing begins when you decide to fill a demand, then it precedes any attempt to create a story through branding, tell it through advertising, or teach it to consumers through public relations.

Credit: Arcanon

Even though the content market has been completely saturated, that’s not what’s killing mainstream media outlets. No, Google, Craigslist, and Amazon are killing mainstream media. Google took away their readers, Craigslist took away their classifieds, and Amazon took away their advertisers. This is what Tom Foremki is getting at when he says:

Silicon Valley has turned into a Media Valley, because so many of our large and startup companies are essentially media companies. They are technology-enabled-media-companies, they sell advertising around content. That’s true for Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Craigslist, and it is true for many smaller companies, Web 2.0 companies, etc. And the rise of social media is just a continuing part of this trend.

What it comes down to is content delivery. These start-ups have made content more accessible and easier to consumer, and if troubled mainstream media outlets are going to reinvent themselve in ways that will increase ad revenues and possibly elicit subscription payments from consumers in an over-saturated market, that’s what they have to do: recreate how their readers/listeners/viewers consume their content — no matter how rich, authoritative, or original it is.

Content production is something that we’ve pretty much figured out across all media. And with the barriers to publishing eroding more everyday, there are more and more producers figuring out those media. It’s not the media, then, that needs perfection, updating, or reinvention. It’s the consumption — the delivery, the targeting, the filtering, the delivery.

This is what Google and Craigslist and Amazon have done. They’ve perfected the delivery of a certain kind of content. What mainstream media outlets should be asking themselves, then, is whether there is a better way to deliver the kinds of content they specialize in to the audience that they cater to. And if so, whether the technological means to doing so are withing, well, their means.

Whatever “it” is, Monty Python seems to have it by the short hairs. I came across this on Johnnie Moore’s blog (who found it on Geoff Jones’ blog). First, the strategy it is exemplar of an established media brand rolling with a fury of punches it can’t deflect. Second, the content is perfectly formated for the web video consumption patterns. Finally, the strategy has a revenue stream component. Now how many video bloggers can claim that they “get” all three of those — especially the last one?

Mainstream Media 1, User Generated New Media Free Hippy Love 0.