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Gerry McGovern
Content Critical
Gaining competitive advantage through high-quality web content
The Web
Content
Style Guide
The essential guide
for online writers, editors and managers
February 24, 2003
Is your content credible and trustworthy?
By Gerry McGovern
The Internet is the single greatest source for information in human history. It is responsible for a revolution in how people inform themselves. The Achilles Heel of the Internet is that much content is neither trustworthy nor credible. While embracing the Internet, people are also highly skeptical of the content they find.
Today, people are more educated than ever. When they make an important decision they want to be informed. They depend less on 'experts.' Instead, they gather information on the Web.
This is not to say that experts don't matter. Experts will continue to play a critical role in how we make decisions. However, we will not revere these experts as many did in the past. We will question their opinions. We will have done our own research. We will compare experts. We will trust more in our own judgment.
The Internet is a huge driver for all this. It empowers all of us well off enough to afford it. In January 2003, the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) published a survey on American Internet usage.
The survey found that 71 percent of Americans used the Internet in 2002. It found that people who went online watched 5.4 fewer hours of TV a week than those who didn't. It found that 61 percent of those using the Internet saw it as a "very important" or "extremely important" source of information. This was higher than for any other source, including television, newspapers and radio.
People don't come online to be entertained. "The real growth we think in the Internet and the perception of it now is as a place you go to find things out," stated UCLA director, Jeff Cole. "The Internet has made very few inroads as a place you go to be entertained."
The Internet is a serious, active place; a place where people go to do things. Sure, you may use the Web to find out about and even book a film. But you will go to the cinema to watch it. You may download music from the Web but you will listen to it in all sorts of places.
Credibility and trustworthiness are major issues for people searching for information. The UCLA survey found that only 52.8 percent of people found most or all of the information online to be credible in 2002, down from 58 percent in 2001, and 55 percent in 2000.
Joe Cole believes that skepticism towards web content is likely to grow. This opinion, in part, is based on focus groups that UCLA carried out, where skepticism towards web content was even more pronounced than in the survey itself.
Many organizations fail to deal properly with credibility and trustworthiness issues. They may invest a lot in technology. They may invest a lot in graphical design. But they often fail to invest sufficiently in content.
Investing in content involves investing in people. Technology will help you publish your content. It is people who will make sure that it is well written. It is people who will make sure that it is accurate. It is people who will make sure that it is up-to-date.
You must get your content right. If it is not credible, not trustworthy, you are better off having no website. Unless, of course, you wish to be viewed as untrustworthy.
Gerry McGovern
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