In yet another example of why corporations don’t understand what social media really is, we now see that in a Forrester survey, corporate blogs are finishing dead last amongst eighteen categories as a source of information. The reason? The blogs are being perceived as being too promotional, as pushing positive stories on the company, its products and services. Gee. What a surprise.

Only 16% of respondents felt that corporate blogs bred a decent level of trust. Email form people one knows was the highest with 77%. This tells me four things.

1) Corporations don’t get social media. OK, that’s obvious. But with all the amount of speeches, presentations, and white papers on this stuff, you’d figure that some of the common sense guidelines would get through. Obviously not.

Josh Bernhoff of Forrester observed, “Everybody thinks their blog is an exception.” Exactly. Regardless of whomever is running the blog operation, you’ve got a corporate culture that doesn’t see beyond itself to see what the blogging culture - and as a whole, that of social media - is about. Blogging is seen as a marketing apparatus that is corporate/product/service centric and not customer centric. That’s the wrong way to go. Corporate blogs have to be customer centric first. Only after establishing a customer centric style blog could a company then add a promotional flavor to it…in limited quanities done in informal language. No exceptions.

2) Social media strategists are yet to be respected. Ouch. Whether it is department heads of communication or CXOs setting the environment for the company blog, one thing is for sure: the message that many of us have been espousing for a few years now is not getting listened to. It’s my guess is that it is being ignored, hence Bernoff’s comment that every company thinks it’s the exception.

Social media is relatively new and I’d bet that many of the real consultants on this - the ones that know what they’re talking about are either relatively young and are automatically ignored by more senior staffers and officials or are too far removed from inside decsion makers and are filited through traditional types who are basically yesmen (and yeswomen) to the people upstairs.

Most of what social media types now say is largely theoretical. Accurate theories in my opinion, but theories nevertheless. We talk amongst ourselves and we listen to one another. But the key officers in the companies that are our clients DON’T listen. At least at the rate they should. I personally don’t really follow any corporate blogs. Maybe I should. Maybe we all should and then pass to one another those that justify the findings in the survey. Maybe we should give the corporate bloggers a chance to change their ways and be less promotional. If we don’t then maybe we should go on the attack. That’s because we’re defending our industry. Which leads me to point #3.

3) This could be fatal to most corporate blogging efforts. Don’t think so? I do. For sure, we’ll see many successful blogs. But I’m betting that for those that don’t adopt the correct customer centric approach, we’ll see abandonment of efforts and then conclusive decsions that blogging doesn’t work or that blogging isn’t for them.

Try to tell a client or prospective client differently and nudge them into what is the right direction? Fuggedaboutit. It won’t work. They won’t listen. They’ve been burned by their own stupidity and arrogance and won’t want to hear anymore of it - especially by someone that they perceive to be less experienced in corporate communications.

4) We must be brave and challenge and say things that prospective clients don’t want to hear. It doesn’t have to be arrogance on our part, but we’re going to have to tell the person on the other side of the table that they’re wrong, that they’re not the exception, and that the way they want to do it will fail. That’s be cause they are wrong, they aren’t the exception, and the way they will do it will fail.

We’ll need to back it up and then not back down. Because 16% is far too low of a trust percentage of what we espouse. Those theories we espouse are worth more than that.