Having read the RWW article on paying bloggers after Jeremiah Owyang making the statement that paying bloggers should be “part of a toolkit,” it jogged my memory.

Here’s a study from 2008 from Gallup.  What it shows is that the perceived ethics and honesty of advertising practitioners is less than congresspeople, lawyers, building contractors – in short, the very bottom of the list only to be rated as “more honest” or “more ethical” than telemarketers, lobbyists, and car salesman.  Around 10% of people think that advertising practitioners are very honest or ethical.

So news flash – there’s not very much trust from the public there with marketers.  Hard to build a “trust economy” (brilliant term by Chris Brogan) when there’s little trust to start with (not a reflection on individuals, but the industry).  There’s a reason why Leo Laporte does not allow marketers on his “This Week In Tech” or “MacBreak Weekly” shows.  The audience, and he, does not trust that there will be honest opinion.

In short, with the influx of all of these already not-trusted by the public marketing and advertising professionals, the “run” on social media is in many ways all about people wanting to “create” trust in a field where the public does not trust advertising professionals.  You can’t create trust – you build trust.  And turning bloggers into salespeople isn’t the way to do it.

Some of the new folks on the scene may not remember this, but why did/do advertisers pay premiums for news content?  Because it was perceived as trusted information.  That seemed to transfer to the companies and brands that advertise during the news (not saying news reporting was perfect in every instance – but rarely, and never where I worked, were stories traded for monetary compensation).

By doing pay-for-post campaigns, as marketers, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot as one will erode the initial trust that social media has built up mainly because it’s up until now not as touched by marketing (or perceived to be).  Sure, everyone needs to eat, there needs to be money made, short term gain will be had, but I think it’ll cannibalize the long-term possibilities of the space (and possibly, just for the properties that partake in this trust auction).

If the social web continues to move down this path, that trust factor that’s been built up is going to flip, and flip hard.  Google knows this and I can surmise that’s why they’re having such hard and fast rules around not allowing page rank to be passed on through sponsored links or posts.  It’s their job to provide the best results, not the bought results on organic search.

A good sign of someone who I know what they’re doing is if I see them cringe around promising a “viral” video. Viral video promises are bull, plain and simple.  We’re not interested in lying to our client’s customers, and I’d rather make a little less money but say we had honest conversations, and created compelling content directed at people that they enjoy and get value from.  It’s about giving value to get value, and this axiom is decades old, if you look back on Jeffrey Gitomer and his predecessors, Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightengale… the list goes on.

Although it will work in the short term, selling away trust in increments will eventually bankrupt the relationships built with people.  We should take a lesson from mortgage/financial disaster hit that all of our stocks have taken after people figured out the truth, and tread carefully.