Social media destroys credibility. So why are you still spending money on it?

The primary benefit and goal of advertising is not, and never has been, what most companies use it for. Instead, the entire focus of advertising has been on a byproduct of the practice: i.e. making sales.?Because corporations have missed the actual goal of media buys, they contribute to the destruction of trust in their ability to deliver an effective and safe product.

History of advertising in a nutshell

Let me provide some historical background to the issue of advertising. Back in 2005, I started blogging and one of the first entries I made came out of my reading of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and some subsequent study of the man. In that post, I pointed out that Franklin believed that a democracy needed an informed public and an informed public was good for business, therefore business should support a free press to inform the public.?

That philosophy benefitted democracies around the world and foiled autocracies ever since.

In the past two decades, however, the explosive growth of the commercial web created assumptions in the marketing/advertising field that clicks and eyeballs were more important than the quality of the content in media.?That has been not only devastating to the vitality of the press but has significantly dumbed down the public into an uninformed mob and aided the rise of autocratic regimes even in the United States .

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An experiment gone bad

Four years before I wrote that post I was in a meeting with the CEOs of a significant niche in the semiconductor industry.?They, as a group, agreed they needed to reduce their advertising spend so there were fewer editorial pages available to cover news of startup competitors.?

It worked. Maybe too well, Those same publications covered the entire semiconductor supply chain.?By 2006, the niche saw the demise of 75 percent of the publications disappear along with 90 percent of the editorial staff. B y 2010 venerable publications like Electronic News were sold, resold, and then closed. By 2020 EE Times shrank to the point that it was sold to a distribution company to be an in-house publication at a fraction of its value.

The degradation in communications channels didn’t end with that.?Even before the devastation of the press sector, companies used news releases as little more than “free” ads because content-hungry publications would post them for free with little or no editorial interference.?Why buy ads when they gave it to you for free??Then came Web 2.0 and social media.?Those technologies were supposed to democratize the web while boosting sales.?The latter worked for a while, but the former never happened.?Corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter opted for profit over democracy.

The demonization of the press

The demonization of the independent press by pretty much all factions were encouraged by these platforms which claimed the theft of press content would be a financial boon to media channels.?That also turned out to be a lie as the platforms raided the advertising revenue that supported the press.

Now we seem to be on the cusp of the end of the Social Media Age, as dominated by companies like @Meta @Twitter and @Google.?Corporations are still advertising on social media platforms. in the past year, advertising on social media has increased by more than $54B, while budgets for newspapers dropped $2.4B. But finding a connection between social media advertising and increased sales is getting difficult.?The underlying reason why that form of advertising is failing is the lack of credible content curation.

For Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and @Sundar Pichai, democratizing content is letting anyone say anything to anyone including people who don’t want to hear it.?But those CEOs never studied political science, journalism, or any other form of communication theory.?They didn’t learn that democracy needed gatekeepers of the public forum that encouraged critical thinking over bias and emotion.?

That ability is the core of journalism.?It creates an informed society that can make intelligent decisions based on information that is as unbiased as a human being can make it.?That level of information is hard to find on your Facebook feed and is pretty much banned on Twitter now.

Trust is where you find it

In some posts from a few weeks ago I mentioned some studies from Gallup and Pew Research.?Both companies have ongoing studies of public trust in media and lots of people who don’t like “the media” like to point out that it is not widely trusted by the general public.

But like a Twitter post, that view is lacking nuance.

There is no such thing as “the media”.?Media is the plural of medium and there are many.?You can break them down into print, radio, broadcast, cable, and streaming.?One might consider online as another medium, but that content seems to include all of the others.?And then you have social media, which is largely based on individual and largely uninformed opinions over research facts.

The Gallup and Pew polls have found that there is a broad spectrum of trust related to what kind of medium is being consumed.?Let’s start with social media.

More than 75 percent of survey respondents said they get most of their news from social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook.?Facebook recently paid for a study on that aspect of their content and found that less than 3 percent of the posts on Facebook come from verified news organizations, so the respondents are not getting much news in their feed.?However, the Gallup and Pew surveys showed that 90 percent of those users distrust the content they see on the sites.?And not just the news they consume but everything they see and h dear.?The most distrusted social medium, BTW, is Youtube.

Let’s settle part of our media definitions here.?If three-quarters of the population get their news from social media, that makes social media “mainstream media” or MSM.?In second place in a dead heat is broadcast and cable media with an 89 percent distrust level.?The most trusted source of information is print media.?That includes actual publications and their online presence.?Less than 20 percent of the respondents said they consumed print news but the majority generally trusted what they read.

The disconnect

Now we are back to a disconnect between what medium advertisers prefer and what value it gives them.

?Companies moved to social media for two reasons: reach and cost.?The selling point was you could potentially reach millions of customers at a fraction of the cost of running ads in broadcast, cable, or print publications.?There are problems with that.?First, the customers, for the most part, distrust the medium and therefore distrust the advertisers.?Sure, there are companies that sell fraudulent products and make a lot of money as long as they keep changing their name and there is a sucker born every minute.?But legitimate companies find that their reputations can be severely harmed by associating with untrustworthy media.?It doesn’t matter how many people you reach or how cheap it is if potential customers think you are lying to them.

Some companies are figuring this out.?Just as corporations abandoned trade media for social media at the start of the century, they are coming back. Advertising in trade magazines was up 3 per cent in 2022 from?what was spent in 2021 and is expected to grow another 3 per cent by 2025.?Newspapers are expected to drop by similar numbers by that time but that may change.?Newspaper and magazine subscriptions are on the rise along with public trust.?There is a reason for that: professional curation.

Professional curation

Everything that produces content, except for social media, has constraints of time, space, and attention spans. Everything but social media.?Social media thrives on short attention spans and has no restraint on time and space. So you get everything. Everything is overwhelming.?But with a print document, you battle attention spans. Online that’s about 700 words. Spoken is about 5 minutes.?You can go longer than that but you have to be very good at explaining things within those constraints. Clarity, conciseness, accuracy, and timeliness are the tools and strength of good journalists.?They are the enemy of viral content, politicians, and people trying to sell you organic boner pills.

Technology is trying to bypass that requirement with generative AI, but that tool lacks critical thinking skills and relies more on conventional wisdom than facts.

In short, the constraints on print journalism make it more trustworthy than social media content.?That is the value of traditional media over social media.?The well-informed public is now a byproduct of media, just as increased sales were a byproduct of advertising.

Democracy isn’t benefitted by a firehose of misinformation, and neither is business.?That leads to the destruction of both. Trust, or more accurately credibility, is now the currency of media.?Facebook, Twitter and Google have all destroyed their credibility with the marketplace along with their supporters.?The way to reverse it is to support media platforms than engender trust.

Therefore, CEOs need to get their checkbooks out and start buying advertising in print publications.?Either that or start looking for jobs and learn to say, “Do you want fries with that?”