Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

We launched the results of this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer in the Westbury Hotel last Tuesday. There was an interesting panel discussion after the presentation with Eamon Gilmore, leader of the Labour party, Pat Delaney from IBEC and Mark Little, ex RTE Primetime presenter.

I’ve included the presentation below and I’ll run through my thoughts on the results below.

I found this year’s media research findings very interesting, with trust in media as an institution falling from 40% to 33%. All three panelists at the event offered some good insights in this respect. Gilmore pointed out that many media organisations are in the entertainment business, rather than the information business.

As Mark Little pointed out, it’s worrying when so many pages and resources are given over to reporting on gangland criminals than analysis on how the Irish economy was so badly affected by the credit crunch.

Little obviously had a lot to say about the media. One of his most interesting comments was that ‘news was a product, now it’s a process.’ The public have the technology to interact with the media and now they want to be engaged.

Slide twenty five caught my attention. Online search engines such as Google and free content sources such as Wikipedia are now as trusted as TV news coverage and articles in national newspapers in Ireland. That is seriously eye-opening.

Radio news coverage ranks higher than both TV and national newspaper coverage, highlighting the strength of local radio as Pat Delaney from IBEC put it.

Another interesting finding in the survey are the big falls in trust for academic/experts and financial/industry experts. People are questioning the personality commentators that have become household names over the past decade. The same experts have suddenly switched tune over the past eighteen months and there seems to be a slew of books recently published which cash in on the credit crunch.

Trust is an interesting concept, in many ways it’s intangible. The events of the last eighteen months, however, indicate that trust or confidence are essential for organisations to operate.

Of all the countries surveyed, Ireland ranks lowest in terms of trust in business and government as institutions. We are in a dangerous place as slide seven shows as Ireland is now skeptical in its outlook. Open a newspaper or turn o a radio station and the mood is one of retribution with members of the public calling for a variety of actions.

One of the current topics of debate, the banking inquiry, is interesting in this respect. Personally, I think it’s a waste of money. I can see how it can help the public psyche though.

I attended a briefing by the IDA last year on their new campaign to instill confidence in companies looking to set up operations in Europe. The IDA are standing out and telling the good news stories that get overlooked in all the negativity.

An interesting aspect of the Trust Barometer data over the past ten years is that if you map the levels of trust with the stock market, the two graphs pretty much overlap. When Ireland recovers, it will be because of a revitalised confidence in our various institutions. To this end, we need more positive thinking from the likes of the IDA, but also a rethink of our ethics and values. As Josef Ackermann, CEO of Deutsche Bank, stated, “Already, we’ve seen speculation that our industry will soon be back to business as usual. let me say clearly: there are lessons from this crisis that we cannot afford to ignore.”