Building credibility and trust takes time
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Written by Atila on August 14, 2008 – 7:35 pm
Because blogs tend to be the voice of an individual, a “real” person, some believe that they are more authentic than the voice of the organization. However, the individual voice is just as open to abuse as that of the organization. There are numerous stories of people being paid to pretend to be independent. In truth, we all have prejudices; it’s just that some of us are better at hiding them than others.
In some cases, the blogger is a fiction. For over three years, thousands of people followed the blog of Plain Layne, a lesbian from Minnesota. It turned out Plain Layne was actually a 35-year-old male entrepreneur from Minnesota. For all its virtues, the Web can be the land of the scam. “Ten Years, Ten Trends,” a 2004 study by the Center for the Digital Future, found that:
•Although the Web has become an important source of information, the initially high level of credibility of information on the Web began to drop in 2003, and declined even further in 2004.
•Websites by established media were trusted by 74% of survey respondents and government websites were trusted by 73%. But websites by individuals – that includes blogs – were trusted by only 9%.
Building credibility and trust takes time, so don’t expect that if you launch a blog it will be an overnight success. Blogging is a form of publishing and most publications that do succeed generally take many years to build up a regular readership. You must be willing to put in quality blogging time week in, week out. A good idea might take up one paragraph but could have taken a day or more to research and think through.
When blogging, remember that the Web has a long memory. Do not publish any material on your blog on impulse. Ask these questions:
•Who might read it? Suppose a prospective employer or customer reads it, what would they think?
•In what ways might it be interpreted?
•How will it stand up in a year? In five years?
•How will it further my career?
GET YOUR OWN WEBSITE
The real advantages of blogging are for individuals like you. You must publish today about the important things you do if you are ambitious. Publishing is about visibility. It’s about getting your name in front of those who matter to you.
If you do something great and don’t create a record of what you did, did you really do it? As far as the Web is concerned, you didn’t, and the Web is becoming the global memory. So you’ve got to get it down – get it recorded.
Academia may look somewhat mild and comradely to an outsider, but it is an intensely competitive environment, governed by the law “publish or perish.” Ambitious and creative academics get published and not-so-ambitious and not-so-creative ones get forgotten. Take Albert Einstein, for example: he gained fame and influence not after he formulated his theories on relativity, but after he published them.
We have moved from lifelong employment to lifelong learning, and the organization has become, in part, like a university. The implications are clear: as members of this lifelong learning university, we will be expected to publish more in order to show what we have learned and to share the best of that learning.
