Mark Twain & Benjamin Disraeli

First, go to http://google.com, type in "Mark Twain & Benjamin Disraeli", click "I'm Feeling Lucky". Do that now. Then come back here.

AdAge has an article out claiming that "the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%," between 2008 and 2010. It goes on to surmise that social media is to blame, "social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust." This is all based on quoting an Edelman (a PR firm) 2010 study.

This is all too facile an explanation, I thought. Sure, the definition of "friends" has loosened considerably thanks to the rise of Facebook. But the chart showing huge (20+ point declines) and across-the-board (TV News, Radio, Newspaper, as well as Friends) declines in trust just screamed "systematic change" to me. So I decided to dig by going to the source and compiled my own graphs from Edelman's data.

And here are the errors from source to article:

1. Edelman distinguishes between "Friends/Peers" and "Social Networking Sites", with different numbers for each category. In fact, the numbers for SNS haven't changed at all from 2008 (20% +/- 5%) to 2010 (19% +/- 5%). In further fact, SNS is the only category not showing a decline from 2008 to 2010. For the article to make a direct link from the "Friends/Peers" numbers to Social Media is erroneous.
   
   
2. It turns out Edelman's numbers on "Friends/Peers" show no 2008-2010 change of that magnitude (-20 points). They do show a 12-point decline for "Friends/Peers", but also 11-13 point declines in Newspaper, TV News, Radio News, and Business Magazines. I don't know where the 2010 numbers for AdAge's chart comes from, but speculatively the systematic offsets could be that they looked at, e.g., numbers from the subset Edelman calls "skeptic countries" (UK/France/Germany), or the subset responding "Extremely Credible" (as opposed to "Extremely Credible" or "Very Credible").

Also, consider the responses to Edelman's trust question for Financial Investments. For that, "Friends or Family" score 61%, second only to "Broker/Advisor", at 68%.

Finally, it is true there seems to be a systematic, exogenous change in trust levels across the board from 2008 to 2010. I consider these to be more likely explanations of this change:

1. The 2008 study was completed in Jan 2008, before most people learned the name Madoff and felt personal pain from the economic contraction. It's not unreasonable to link these events to an across-the-board decline in trust. Or,
   
   
2. A systematic offset due to sample error or methodology changes in the studies.

All the same, it's all too facile to blame social-networking for this decline. Edelman's numbers don't show that. At all. And hats off to my new Facebook friend, Shiv Singh, for surfacing this in my activity stream :)