My social media role model, Kevin O’Keefe, blogged an interesting question yesterday, Individual lawyer or law firm blog, which is trusted more? Kevin is President and Founder of LexBlog, the pioneer in law firms and lawyers with blog (and non-lawyers such as yours truly).
Understandably Kevin puts the trust issue – and it is indeed an issue today – in the context of the legal profession. But I’m a business owner in the retirement plan business that sees trust with a different perspective: trust between retirement plan sponsors and employees and their service providers.
Trust in institutions is a big issue worldwide. For the past 15 years, the Edelman Annual TrustBarometer, has tracked trust in business, media, government, and non-government organizations. The 2015 edition tells a sad story. There has been a global decline in trust over the last year, and the number of countries with trusted institutions has fallen to an all-time low among the informed public.
Bottom line (pun intended) from my vantage point is that people do not trust business. It’s never been more difficult and complex in recent years to build and maintain credibility. But the 2015 data shows that now more than ever, a company’s employees are one of the most trusted sources of information. Edelman calls it “tapping the internal trust surplus”.
So Kevin, based on the Edelman data and my own experience, I vote for the Individual Lawyer.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Mark Smiciklas.