With the world moving online and exponentially turning to blogs and other forms of personal publishing – podcasting, vidcasting, and whatever comes next - surely we are going to become less impressionable to the targeted pitch. Within seconds of being exposed to advertising I can now go online and find corroborating or contradictory first-hand evidence from an independent source. What hope does an Adsense ad have when I can quickly find real-world opinions about that seller or product, or a competitor? And in the blogosphere I don’t need to worry about sniffing out shill reviews planted in the Epinions of the world – a blog provides me with a blogger’s entire body of work, which I can explore to determine whether or not the source is to be trusted.

The traditional approach to corporate communications envisages a controlled process of scripted messages delivered by the chief executive, first to investors, then to other opinion-formers, and only later to the mass audiences of employees and consumers. In the past five years, this pyramid-of influence model has been gradually supplanted by a peer-to-peer, horizontal discussion among multiple stakeholders. The employee is the new credible source for information about a company, giving insight from the front lines. The consumer has become a co-creator, demanding transparency on decisions from sourcing to new-product positioning.

[...] The most profound finding of the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer is that in six of the 11 countries surveyed, the "person like yourself or your peer" is seen as the most credible spokesperson about a company and among the top three spokespeople in every country surveyed. This has advanced steadily over the past three years.