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Go ahead and judge this by its cover

In reading an interesting post over at Web Strategist yesterday, I was reminded of one of the most important aspects of any relationship: Trust. The most surprising point that is brought up in looking at the featured Forrester research is that blogger reviews of products are less trusted than that of major news organizations and the manufacturers themselves. While this seems to be contradictory to the idea of the semantic web, I think that when we dig in a little deeper we can reveal some very important points about trust and the creation of a trusting relationship with online users. Are these channels truly being measured on equal footing or does something besides quality of content come into play?

It is well discussed and hypothesized that first impressions affect the overall judgment of quality for online experiences. I group into quality the aesthetic, functional and informational quality of a site or experience online. Research has been done that indicates that as little as 50 milliseconds are needed to pass judgment on a site from a visual appeal and aesthetics standpoint. And after that point, the damage is done and any further impressions will build from that initial impression, often building evidence in the favor of the direction initially perceived. In other words, if the initial impression is negative, a user is likely to hold additional issues or findings about an experience to a higher set of standards than if the initial impression was positive. In fact, some go as far as to say that usability issues can be forgiven if a site is particularly pleasing in the aesthetic realm.

So, that explains how visual appeal can affect the online experience a user has but what else goes into building trust in a virtual world? This article from Human Factors International loosely defines trust as “…the attitude that an agent will help to achieve an individual’s goals in a situation characterized by uncertainty.” This happens to be a perfect definition for the task we want to analyze, reading a product review. They go into what factors impact trustworthiness online: Professional Looking, Ease of Use, Speed of Response, Interactive Features, and Informative Content are just a few. There is also the aspect of familiarity to consider in this quandary since it has also been hypothesized that people prefer things they have seen before to having brand new experiences.

So you may wonder, what does this all have to do with the lack of trust in blog sites as compared with major news sites, well known blogs and manufacturer sites?

To answer that, I leave you with 4 links:

The No Name Blogger

The Major Blogger

The Major News Outlet

The Corporate Website

Which site would you trust to have the best review? See if you can use the ideas discussed above to predict which will be perceived as more successful without actually reading the content, then read the content and see if your first impressions were right?

For those interested, there is a great paper available called: Aesthetics, Visual Appeal Usability and User Satisfaction that provided a lot of insight on this topic for me. But why should I even bother, I am just a blogger no one can trust.