The New Trust Deficit: Facebook, Facts & a Frantic News Cycle

The U.S. is facing a number of simultaneous crises -- rising COVID infections, ongoing civil rights protests for BLM, an economy in recession that's driving huge job losses, bankruptcies, supply chain issues that could cause further harm. 

But there's one thing making each of those crisis worse, more dangerous and out of control.

It's that we can't agree on a single set of facts.

Instead, we have a credibility gap making things worse. Different parts of the country can't even agree about how to frame the various crises, including those cited above and others that have been in the news lately.

CNN's Reliable Sources newsletter recently called this a "trust deficit" in a story about Facebook and why some companies have stopped buying ads on Facebook.

For Facebook, the trust deficit is fueled by allowing misinformation and hate speech to spread.

Social media platforms use algorithms to continue to feed you content similar to the kinds of content you click on. This makes it easy to perpetuate your bubble because you continually see posts that fit your narrative.

Part of the problem: some information may have already been debunked only after we've seen it. Which is too late. People who consume the original message, and used that to bolster their narrative, rarely see the correction or update afterwards.

Another problem: we're so inundated by news that we're overwhelmed. We don't have time to process yesterday's news. Which means we don't have time to process today's news, to put it into context, to make sure we understand it -- before we're hit with the latest shocking piece of news, which is replaced by the even-more-recent news.

The result: we now live in a world with strongly held opinions that aren't necessarily based on facts. 

Which means: we might not agree that the top stories that are, in fact, the most important stories. 

We certainly don't agree with the implications of those stories -- whether they are fake news or facts might be debatable if we could meaningfully debate these issues. 

And we definitely disagree regarding any possible solution to a given crisis.

It's a helluva way to celebrate our nation's independence. 

We try to avoid taking political stands in this blog. But we're tackling the trust deficit because we do see it as a potential business threat for marketers.

It means that where you advertise (and where you don't), where and what you post could be seen as supporting or fueling the trust deficit. It's more important than ever to think about how you communicate to your publics while being aware and sensitive to how your marketing plays today and how it might play in a couple of years.

20 Ongoing Trends That Will Continue in 2020

Each year we identify a set of ongoing trends that have a longer shelf life and will impact the following year.

Here are the ones we think significant for 2020. In some cases, the trends below will have a paragraph of explanation and in other cases, just a headline is enough.

1.   News fatigue. We typically stay away from making predictions about politics but as the election gets closer, Americans are likely to feel overwhelmed by hourly news notifications on their phones and Fitbit or Apple Watches -- the term we've seen is "ringxiety" -- to the extent that they will shut down and look for content that will distract them. There will also be a contingent who will be more motivated to seek out updates but we haven't identified a clever term for them. We don't think there will podcast fatigue in 2020 but that could come, since the glut of podcasts, no matter how compelling, does not yet seem to be abating.

2.  Short news cycles. In a recap of news from 2019, an article mentioned the longest government shut down that ended Feb. 2019. But so much happened in 2019, that a bunch of us in the office had forgotten about the shutdown. Shorter news cycles mean that a lot of news that would have once been significant and memorable gets forgotten as we get hit by more recent news.  

3.  "News deserts" will continue to grow as more news outlets cut back the amount of news they produce, lay off staffs, reduce the number of days they print, etc. News deserts were once limited to rural communities but now large cities are feeling the loss of some outlets.

4.   Fake news and disinformation will continue, probably increase in 2020.

5.  The credibility of news media is under attack. For marketers, reaching customers while they are overwhelmed by disinformation/fraud and when the media is not seen as credible (whether on the right or left), will become harder and more complicated. This is not a political stance. The point is that marketers are going to need to find more effective ways to reach customers at a time of fragmentation and low trust.

6.   Social media will continue to undergo scrutiny and it won’t look good. 

7.   Cord-cutting will continue to attract the media's attention. With so many streaming services, cord cutting won't be cheap but will be a bit easier due to TVs that make it easier -- but not yet seamless -- to binge on the shows you want, regardless of which streaming services you subscribe to.

8.  Most tech reporters at newspapers will continue to focus on FAANG: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

9.   Elon Musk and Tesla will continue to attract undue amount of media attention. 

10. Driverless cars still won't be ready. 

11.  Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality still won’t be everywhere.

12. Blockchain and bitcoin will continue to get media coverage but most consumers still won't have much contact with bitcoin and won't understand how Blockchain affects them.

13. Corporate boycotts & consumer boycotts will continue. Corporate boycotts are when companies pull their ads from specific shows, hosts or networks to protest something said or done. 

14. 3-D content and 3-D printers will still not be as popular as they are cool.

15. Student debt and healthcare will continue to be big issues.

16. Climate change will be an issue. Especially in the wake of the wild fires in Australia and elsewhere.

17. Drug pricing will continue to get a lot of attention. 

18. STEM will continue to be important. 

19. More small colleges will merge or close. Nearly 20 small private colleges in New England have shut down in the past five years, and we expect more as education goals evolve due to declining enrollment and resulting budget problems. There’s also more competition for better-known colleges. Expect more colleges to emphasize career readiness. (Probably because the cost is so high, it’s hard to justify pursuing fields that don’t lead to a career.

20. The future continues to look cloudy – as in cloud computing.

There certainly are more ongoing trends. Let us know us know if you think we left out anything significant. If you want more detail about some of the trends for which we did not provide detail here, check out our blog, where have mentioned some of these quite a lot.

4 Additional Media Trends for 2019: including "News Fatigue"

We live in a media-centric world. And by "we," we certainly mean Birnbach Communications but we also mean Americans. That's true even as:

• Traditional media has been facing a tough time because their business models have been failing, despite a significant uptick in the demand for news.
• Digital media isn't the sure thing it was once thought to be, despite the lack of traditional media's baggage (like lack of printing presses).
• Local media outlets have been shutting down, despite the common wisdom that hyperlocal was a solution.
• People aren't reading newspaper content on paper (but on screens) or watching TV shows on TV (but on screens).

Last week, we issued our top five media trends that included: the rise of streaming content; the age of mass media is dead; the broken business model and the rise of "news deserts"; social media under scrutiny; and more apps will try to fight/block fake news.

But we have more -- yes, more -- media predictions. Keep in mind that some of these are based on predictions we made for 2018 but it's important to note that we believe this trends will continue, which is why they didn't make our top 5 but why we're included them here:

1.  The shorter/faster news cycle is distracting Americans and causing news fatigue. We're suffering from news fatigue -- overwhelmed by news notifications on our phones that seems to buzz every hour. There’s never enough time to process significant news before we’re buzzed by the next alert (that may not be relevant). News is so pervasive it overtakes previously non-politicized events like sporting events, entertainment industry award ceremonies, family holiday meals, etc. That buzz is so addictive that people actively check social media to get the latest shocking news. Even reporters who don’t cover politics flood their social media timelines with political news (regardless of their political beliefs), making it harder to get their attention when pitching them. The 24/7 distraction also makes it harder for people to pay attention to your story – so it may take more touchpoints to break through the clutter.
2. The incredible shrinking newsroom. A decade ago, most newsrooms used to employ more reporters to cover the news, and the amount of pages that newspapers and magazines had to fill was larger. Today, news reporters have to cover more news with fewer resources and less space. Locally, at the Boston Business Journal, a terrific weekly, staff reporters typically file four or so stories a day, may have a weekly newsletter they produce and then must write a longer article for the weekly printed edition. Radio reporters now also have to write up a print story for the website in addition to producing their stories for the radio. All of this is to say that there are fewer reporters and they have to produce much more. This makes it challenging for them to take meetings, cultivate sources, uncover stories that need to be told. According to the UNC School of Media and Journalism's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, the result of all this is that "Many newspapers have become ghosts of their former selves, both in terms of the quality and quantity of their editorial content and the reach of their readership." (See credibility issues, below.)
3. The credibility of news media is under attack. There is at least one area of commonality between liberals and conservatives: each group has key media it favors (due to confirmation bias, i.e., their echo chamber) and those outlets whose reports they disagree with and don't believe. Americans increasingly hate either Fox or CNN; the New York Times or Wall St. Journal, for example. With Trump and others calling articles they don't like "Fake News" or "the enemy of the people," and people on the other side pointing to Hannity (who had said he wouldn't campaign for Trump but then came out on stage at Trump's last rally before the midterms), etc., the problem is that the credibility of journalist and media outlets across the spectrum is now being questioned.  That's a real problem for PR functions and agencies who work with reporters, editors and producers to tell their clients' stories. If there are those who disbelieve the New York Times or Wall St. Journal, will they believe your organization's news in those or other outlets? Seems doubtful. 
4. The war on screen time. There will be greater acknowledgment that we’re all on screens too much throughout the day. It’s a problem for everyone, not just adults. We expect more people – suffering from news fatigue, will turn off notifications on their phones so they don’t get interrupted/distracted as much. And somewhat ironically, there will be apps, like Apple’s "Screen Time" and Google’s "Family Link," a parental controls app, that will help you manage your screen addictions.

We've previously mentioned news fatigue in posts about living in the "Age of Anxiety" and are including it in our 2019 set of predictions because we think both will continue (we're not out of the anxiety woods yet and were going to continue to suffer from news fatigue for some time to come.

We will post more of predictions over the next few weeks. Let us know what you think.

Track Record: How We Scored on Ongoing Trends

We identified 18 ongoing trends for 2018, and we think we did well with regard to most of them. 

1. The news cycle will continue to speed up. People are experiencing news fatigue because so much is happening daily. (By contrast, there were only a few stories — like the rescue of the Thai soccer team — that had the staying power to dominate the news cycle over a period of days. Otherwise, most stories, even some that previously would have dominated for a week or two disappeared, often without having much impact in 2018. This will continue in 2019. Grade: A+.
2. 2018 will be tough for traditional and online media. Unfortunately, true. Grade: A+.
3. Fake news won’t fade in 2018. Unfortunately, true. Grade: A+.
4. Cord cutting will continue but still won't save money: Netflix dominated news coverage and more media companies are offering streaming services but we did see an uptick in coverage that cord cutting is complicated and expensive. Grade. A.
5. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality still won’t be everywhere. Both VR and AR are making progress but neither is there yet. Grade: A.
6. IoT will continue to be victim to cyberattacks. This did not get as much attention as we expected but that may be because IoT and Smart Homes have not been broadly adopted yet. Grade: C.
7. The future is still looking cloudy. This may be the one tech trend that has yet to experience a backlash. Grade: A.
8. Driverless cars attract significant coverage. Got lots of coverage in 2018. We think it’s going to take longer than most people think for driverless cars to get wide approval. We also said we think electric cars will generate more media coverage. Tesla certainly got tons of coverage in 2018, not all of it positive. Grade: B+.
9. There's never enough cybersecurity/privacy. Unfortunately, true. Grade: A+.
10. NFL ratings will continue to decline. We were right for the 2017-2018 season, because overall, ratings were soft. The 2018-2019 season seems to be rebounding (which we realize is a basketball term). Grade: B-.
11. Corporate boycotts & consumer boycotts will continue. We saw some high profile boycotts from brands that pulled their advertising from controversial hosts. This will continue in 2019. Grade: B+.
12. Drug pricing will continue to get a lot of attention. And we said, “But there won’t be an easy solution so don’t expect much except outrage.” Grade: A.
13. Wearable tech will still not be as mainstream as people in the industry were hoping. True, which is why we did not see much media coverage about wearable in 2018. We still believe wearable is making progress but 2018 was not its year for media coverage. Grade: B.
14. STEM will continue to be important. STEM is important but isn’t getting the media coverage it used to generate. Grade: C+.
15. 3-D content, 3-D TV and 3-D printers will still not be as popular as they are cool. Correct (we still think). Grade: A.
16. Artisanal will still be a hot concept. True as far as we can tell but that doesn’t translate into media coverage. Grade: C.
17. e-Wallets still will gain traction in 2018 but mostly for Millennials as opposed to their parents. True as far as we can tell but that doesn’t translate into media coverage. Grade: C.
18. Content management remains king.  True as far as we can tell but that doesn’t translate into media coverage. Grade: C.

Let us know if you agree or disagree with our grading or if we missed an ongoing trend in 2018.

Ongoing Trends for 2018

Not all significant trends next year will be new ones.  We always look at ongoing trends that will continue to impact the media, marketing and tech worlds.

The first 14 of the 18 trends listed below include an explanatory sentence. The final four are, we feel, self-explanatory.

1.  The news cycle will continue to speed up. There were days in which there was major news several times a day. We expect that to continue in 2018 – and that when there’s a slow news day – let’s say only one big news story – consumers of news anxiously click on refresh, thinking they must be missing some additional news. Regardless of political views, people, including late-night comedians are finding this exhausting.

2.   2018 will be tough for traditional and online media. We hate writing this but the layoffs and shutdowns affecting traditional print (Boston Herald) and cool online outlets (BuzzFeed) that occurred the last two months of 2017 will continue in 2018. Despite living in a time when staying on top of the news (throughout the day) has never been more important, with more people than ever following hourly developments, fewer people seem to want to pay for the news. This is true also for hyperlocal media (like DNAInfo and Gothamist, both shutdown), which for a time was considered to be an exception since people seemed to favor local news about their communities that weren’t getting covered by regional or national media. Great reporting takes lots of effort and resources (as does debunking fake news, as the Washington Post showed us when it reported on a failed attempt to offer a false narrative by the Veracity Project). The problem for traditional and online news sources is, increasingly, Americans turn to social media for news. So traditional and even online media need to develop a new advertising and subscription business model. So far, great journalism is helping the New York Times and Washington Post attract and retain subscribers. But it must be frustrating for them to see hat purveyors of true “fake news” (those that are not based on facts and don’t correct mistakes once they learn of them) can generate tens of thousands of page views when real, serious news doesn’t get clicked.  Another aspect that will affect traditional and online media will be if either or both of the AT&T-Time Warner and Sinclair Broadcasting-Tribune Media deals go through.

3.  Fake news won’t fade in 2018. It’s still easier and more lucrative to generate totally fake news than it is to produce real, fact-based news. Some players are doing this for financial gain and others for a different, more sinister reason, and we expect both to continue in 2018. If Facebook, Google and Twitter all have trouble dealing with the fake news scourge, how will regulations and Congress be able to solve what the social media giants can’t? (For more on this, check out "Why the Fact-Checking at FB Needs to Be Checked: Some measures may not work all that well.") 

4.  Cord cutting will continue but still won't save money: Streaming will continue to be popular but consumers will at some point realize they are not saving money. There will be more streaming services, making it complicated to watch what you want on your TV (remember those?) and you’ll still have to open different apps to find the movie or TV show you want to watch.

5.  Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality still won’t be everywhere. Both VR and AR are making progress but neither is there yet.

6.  IoT will continue to be victim to cyberattacks. We think there will be more IoT cyberattacks, as IoT and Smart Homes go mainstream. Perhaps the only advantage of having to get up and walk over to a light switch is that hackers can’t hack your home.

7.  The future is still looking cloudy. This may be the one tech trend that has yet to experience a backlash.

8.  Driverless cars attract significant coverage. There’s lots of interest in driverless cars because driving is such a part of the American persona. While there’s been great momentum forward, we’re also seeing new challenges that need to be addressed: insurance-related, business model, infrastructure, and tech issues. Do you need Uber and Lyft if you can own or rent a driverless car? If you can rent, why do you need to buy a car? If Uber and Lyft deploy driverless cars, what happens to their former drivers? Meanwhile, we’re also seeing a push for electric cars; China announced plans to eliminate all new combustion cars and trucks by 2030 so we expect to see the rest of the world to follow, which one challenge being ensuring there are enough charging stations.

9.  There's never enough cybersecurity/privacy. There’s still not enough of either. The European Union has proposed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to strengthen and unify data protection for individuals within the EU but it also will affect companies outside the EU. So expect that U.S. companies will need to look at and evaluate how to meet GDPR.

10. NFL ratings will continue to decline. We don’t know whether it’s because of too much football (we’ve never liked Thursday night games) or because of severe injuries or because of the protests but we expect this to continue.

11. Corporate boycotts & consumer boycotts will continue. These are boycotts by companies in order to demonstrate distance from controversial programs and personalities. We also expect boycotts of companies that are boycotting those controversial people and programs.

12. Drug pricing will continue to get a lot of attention. But there won’t be an easy solution so don’t expect much except outrage.

13. Wearable tech will still not be as mainstream as people in the industry were hoping. But wearable will make quiet inroads so that before you know it (probably not in 2018, though), lots of things will have built-in technology.

14. STEM will continue to be important. With a looming labor shortage (in some fields), businesses are looking for employees with a firm grasp of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). We think funding for STEM will continue to keep U.S. businesses competitive.

15.   3-D content, 3-D TV and 3-D printers will still not be as popular as they are cool.

16.   Artisanal will still be a hot concept.

17.  e-Wallets still will gain traction in 2018 but mostly for Millennials as opposed to their parents.

18.  Content management remains king.  

Recap of Our Predictions for 2017

We feel it’s not enough to issue predictions for the upcoming year. We also think it’s important to look at how we did with predictions for 2017.

A brief recap – though we predicted a shorter news cycle in 2017, we did not expect it to be this fast/short. Whether or not you’re a news junkie (and if you’re reading this, we assume you are), 2017 has been an unusually exhausting year. Even generally apolitical Jimmy Fallon envisioned Halloween nightmare that entailed being unable to escape the news cycle. There were a lot of stories this year that we (nor anyone else) predicted – a list of so many, mostly political (which we avoid), we are not going to list them here. We will say that we did not expect the solar eclipse to generate so much coverage.

One of the big themes late in the year was the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in Hollywood, politics, the media, and pretty much every field; we hope awareness of and concern regarding sexual harassment continues to be a public conversation that will make it difficult for those perpetrating the harassment to get away with it. We also hope that it will be easier for victims to be believed and supported.

Here are our assessment of our predictions for this year.

1. Fake news won’t fade in 2017. 

Unfortunately, we were right about this one. “Fake news” is too broad a term says Claire Wardle, Strategy and Research Director of First Draft News, a nonprofit research group housed at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. Wardle told CNN’s Brian Stelter on his “Reliable Sources” podcast that there are “three different types of problems:

• Mis-information: “the kind of false information disseminated online by people who don't have a harmful intent.”
• Dis-information: “false information created and shared by people with harmful intent. False news reports around presidential candidates ahead of the 2016 election fall into this category, and so does their social media amplification from malicious accounts.”
• Mal-information: “the sharing of ‘genuine’ information with the intent to cause harm. That includes some types of leaks, harassment and hate speech online.”

Keep in mind: the general definition of “fake news” tends to be news the speaker doesn’t agree with – it’s actual truth, notwithstanding.

We think Wardle’s definitions are useful to understand there are flavors of fake. But we don’t think the distinctions will become mainstream because currently there isn’t much consensus on facts (or “facts”), with one person’s dis-information (harmful intent) being someone else’s mis-information (false information passed along with non-harmful intent).

Meanwhile, we said it will be difficult for social media sites to combat the spread of fake news, especially because they profit from fake news.

Grade: A+.

2. Big Social will evolve in 2017, but not necessarily in a good way. 

Unfortunately, we were right about this, too. We said, Twitter’s future “is very much in doubt,” and that continues to be true. We said that Facebook is facing problems about fake news, and that was proven true in November’s Congressional hearings. But we left out Google – oops. We said, “all of this turmoil will benefit Snapchat, which is already is favored by the millennials,” and Instagram, and we think that’s right – butt we overstated things when we predicted that SnapChat will be the dominant social media platform by 2018. We also predicted “LinkedIn will thrive as long as it remains (as we think it will) apolitical,” and that’s been true.

Grade: B+

3. The media cycle will speed up. 

This certainly was true in 2017. While President Trump’s use of Twitter to announce official government policy certainly is a major reason, it’s just one factor. Another: a recent Pew Research Center report found that, “About a quarter of all U.S. adults (26%) get news from two or more social media sites, up from 15% in 2013 and 18% in 2016.” So expect this trend to continue into 2018 and beyond. (This is not necessarily a good thing but was predicted in the early 1980s by futurist Alvin Toffler.)

Grade: A+

4. The gig economy and the sharing economy will continue to go mainstream.

Independent contractors or contingent employees – as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) used to refer to them – now comprise an estimated 30% of the U.S. workforce. The BLS and U.S. Census Bureau plan to do a better job of tracking the gig economy. In the meantime, we were right when we said, “We need to more accurately define the gig and the sharing economies… to gain an accurate portrait of overall U.S. economy as well as develop appropriate policies regarding taxes, healthcare and social services.” Both the New York Times and Wall St. Journal validated our predictions.

Grade: A

5. IoT will continue to open the door to cyberattacks.

This was not as big an issue in 2017 as we expected. That does not mean the threat is over. As the Internet of Things (IoT) does go mainstream, cyberattacks remain a significant threat – though likely more targeted to companies than to the average home. But overall, we overstated this.

Grade: C

We will post more of our annual recap in the next few days.

Is Your Organization Social Media Responsive?

What seems like a long time ago, the news cycle was about 24 hours -- from the time "news" happened to when it would appear in newspapers and then on TV and radio. (At that time, cable news didn't really exist.)

Now, the news cycle is probably an hour -- tops -- before it hits social media.

It used to be that if you were in a crisis, you had hours to assess and determine how to respond.

Hours is a luxury.

Six years ago, during the Arab Spring, Kenneth Cole, a clothing designer also known for provocative ad campaigns, posted a provocative tweet in the morning and didn't check back until late in the afternoon when he realized Twitter was in an uproar because he didn't update or apologize in the initial blow back.

The fact that he was in meetings and busy was seen as no excuse.

Companies no longer have hours -- they didn't even have that back in 2011 -- to contemplate a response.

We see the implications of this everyday, whether it is a tweet rant from Trump or a poorly executed tweet from a brand or media property.

Unfortunately, most companies aren't social media responsive, by which we mean: able to respond quickly to a problem involving them on social media.

Here are some steps to consider:

• Don't rely on apps that post content to also alert you to a potential problem. Posting content is very different from monitoring and generating alerts. Consider subscribing to an alert service so that you don't find out about a problem only the next time you log on to the app. Too many services -- even Twitter -- do a better job of capturing mentions without doing a good job alerting you. (We're not going to mention specific potential suppliers since some of these companies and a lot of their functionality can change very quickly.)
• Make sure appropriate trusted people within your organization have the username and passwords for all major social media platforms, and are comfortable posting onto them. Too often, the login information for a company's social media accounts are held by different people so that if a problem happens, and the person managing Twitter is in an all-day off-site, there's no one else who can access the site to try to put out a fire. Sometimes, we've seen, the person in charge of, say, Facebook, has left the company without designating someone as the administrator, only as someone who can post. It's important that trusted people can back up the main driver if that driver is out of the office. Also, for this reason, it's important to know when key people -- whether it's the social media guru or the executive to be quoted -- are on vacation or otherwise unreachable for long periods.
• Do scenario planning to practice how to respond. One hopes to never have to use a crisis plan but it really is helpful to develop one, even if just for social media. In this case, you would look at likely areas for concern -- could it be a customer complaint? A rogue tweet (meant, perhaps, for someone's personal account)? A hacked account? A legal issue? What should you do to address this issues? Without a scenario planning, you may not have an idea of what to do when seconds count.

By the way, the same should be done with a look to how to respond to the media. 

For example, there used to be something known as a "day-two" story -- a story that provided a different aspect of the story getting media's attention. On the first day, the news breaks. On day two, one might pitch a story that provides more context to yesterday''s breaking news.

As with everything else, the time to develop and pitch day-two stories has shortened considerably. Now known as "news jacking," the idea of responding to breaking news and inserting your company in an appropriate and positive way, you need to respond with a contextual pitch within hours, not days. The context to the story that former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick started hitting as soon as the initial stories began hitting. 

While it's true that stories still appeared about a week after he was pushed out, the names of the executives who were being quoted were big name celebrity executives like SalesForce CEO Marc Benioff and former Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer. 

If you want to be able to position yourself as an expert to the media on a breaking news topic, you need to respond much faster than you used to in order to get coverage.

Of course, you still have time to write a blog article for your corporate blog (like this one) after the fact but that's not the same as being quoted in a reputation-making outlet, blog or podcast. Your team and the executive(s) in charge have to have a sense of urgency.

Without that urgency, you may be able to respond but you won't truly be responsive.

As a caveat: Not every organization can or should move that quickly. But we're speaking to those organization whose marketing director is looking for quick hits by news jacking without providing the resources or the ability to move as quickly as you have to secure coverage.