Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research analyst and co-author of social media book Groundswell, just posted results on Q2 data that shows consumers in North America generally don't trust corporate blogs. Only 16% do. Here's their chart that captures the results in this graph.

I find this really interesting and have a few opinions about it, especially related to Japan.

1. First, people in the survey appear to trust almost anything but blogs. Even emails from companies gets 28% trust, 12% more than blogs. Direct mail got a surprising 25%. Josh's point in his post is that corporate blogs are mainly about the company, not the customers' issues which is a hard sell to readers and doesn't build trust. He says that some company blogs like Rubbermaid's take a customer perspective for better results. I'm going to have a look later.

2. The analyst says that North American's generally don't trust companies, regardless of whether it's a blog or not. Their numbers confirm that most trusted is email from a friend at 77% and consumer product rating sites at 60%. This is no surprise to me. North Americans are generally cynical when it comes to corporations (think Enron) and bashing companies has become a national pass-time in the blogosphere. Edelman has a bit more to say about this.

3. Now this is where I'm going out on a limb and could be showing some ignorance, but it seems to me that Japanese are similar and different in some key ways to their North American counterparts. Based on no data but my 15 years experience living in Japan, I think that Japanese consumers are generally more trusting overall and less cynical about mass marketing. And I'd conjecture that compared to the low 18% trust for user generated blog for Americans, I would bet my pajamas that Japanese web users who supposedly read blogs at 52% compared to the US 25% (past Forrester research) trust blogs possibly 10-20% more than North Americans - both user and corporate blogs. From my conversations with Japanese people about companies, their is much less cynicism about companies taking advantage of consumers (expect recent Chinese manufacturers) and companies appear to take on a more governmental persona compared to the way people in North America perceive them. I suppose this goes back to the idea of lifetime employment that has only recently started to come to an end in Japan.

4. At the same time, similar to North Americans, Japanese appear to trust consumer rating and review sites, based on the success of Kakaku.com, with 38% reading user ratings and reviews, to 25% in North America (see Forrester's comparison). So I think they trust other people's opinions and use them to reconfirm their own beliefs. This obviously makes sense in a group oriented society like Japan.

I'd like to know what others have to think about this. Do you think Japanese are more trusting of corporations, company blogs and more trusting in general? Do you know of any data similar to Forrester's North American blog survey? Am I being naive (lay it on me)? If Japanese ARE more trusting, is there really a need for company blogs in Japan (ie. companies or CEOs trying to explain themselves)? If it is true that Japanese trust social media differently, then the next question is how different should social media strategy be for companies trying to use SM in Japan?