Social Media is less trusted today shock!

Yes, it is true - Social Media is less trusted as a source of product recommendation, says Edelman's latest trust barometer. Why is this, I hear you cry - well, BBH labs obfuscates it in it's article ""Will Social Media Eat Itself":

In difficult times, we are drawn to authority: we want there to be expert opinions and definitive answers.

As the network expands, connections weaken: It is perhaps inevitable that the bigger our networks get, the less absolute trust we have in the individuals within them.

As social media adopts the behaviours of old media, it loses credibility: We’ve pay per tweet, but the influx of blunt commercial messages into Social Media does seem to be impacting trust.

Genuinely useful and relevant uses of the social graph have been slow to emerge: Some of the developments we’ve collectively been most enthused by seem to have stalled in development.

They offer some solutions to the predicament, but these seem to be much on the line of "how to skew the medium to make people unable to avoid the marketing message" - you will be marketed to, and trust us while we do it dammit

I would argue that they are avoiding the fundamental problem - social media is not trusted as much now because the people driving it and using it are not as trustworthy as they were.

The combination of:

- Perversion of social media from a communication to a commercial medium (the massive rise of flacking on Twitter for example)

- Widespread abuse of people's privacy and information (From Beacon to Buzz - nuff said?)

Its the classic case of marketeering, like tourism, destroying what gives it succour. The solution is obvious - to make social media trusted again, eradicate the untrustworthy people on it. But that includes most marketeers.....

The issue is not so much social media eating itself, but marketeers not realising that then sh*tting in one's own pool is a dumb idea. But so long as a social media system is seen as a flogger's free-for-all, then the tragedy of the (marketing) commons will be prevalent.

Update - Tom Ewing points out the latest survey show trust in all media falling - but this doesn't reconcile with stuff we have from a few years back showing that other media had by and large fallen already. Will have to dig more......