Last month’s Edelman trust barometer showed that trust in traditional media and journalism has increased, while trust in social media and search engine results has decreased.

By Richard Stone 

Trust in journalism jumped five points, which is a remarkable result, given the bashing that the media overall has taken at the hands of fake news.

Interestingly, expertise is once more returning to credibility, following Donald Trump’s famous remarks about his own distrust of experts. Journalists have risen 12 points, since 2017 and CEOs recorded a seven-percentage point gain. Technical experts, financial industry analysts, and successful entrepreneurs now register credibility levels of 50 percent or higher.

It’s interesting that trust in journalists has increased by more than trust in journalism, suggesting that our faith in published material has been impacted by the ease of electronic publishing. The new wave of citizen journalists and bloggers this has created may not be as trusted as traditional journalists

But the bottom line is we still trust the published views of experts more than any other source. So, if you are featured in the media, possibly thanks to the labours of your hard-working PR agency, you should make the best of the content that gets published.

Here are our top three tips for doing exactly that:

1, Invest in an easy way to display your clippings online: At Stone Junction, we provide an electronic coverage book for each of our clients, that allows them to easily view their clippings online, through a private, password protected, web portal. Just in case this is hard to visualise, here’s an example.

2, Make sure you tell your web site visitors about your newfound credibility: When that valuable media coverage comes in, you should be certain to make sure it’s easy to see on your website. You can use the logos of the media that have covered you in an ‘as seen on’ section on your homepage and, providing you have the appropriate copyright licences, you can post links to the coverage in your media section.

3, Share the results on social media: Social media is amongst the first places that we turn to validate the information we’ve gathered about a potential supplier. Don’t believe me? Check out this video; Texas Instruments certainly thinks its true. As a result, you should be sharing all your media coverage on Twitter and the highlights on LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as other platforms that suit your audience.

If you want to generate more media coverage, or even make the best of the coverage you have already generated (and you do trust experts - unlike Donald Trump) get in touch with the experts at Stone Junction for a chat. We could even send you some of our own media coverage to prove we’re trustworthy.