Japan’s Bloggers More Trusting Than Their English Counterparts

By IR Web Report Staff

A COMPARISON of Japanese and English-language bloggers reveals stark differences in their attitudes towards corporations and in their reasons for blogging.

Public Relations firm Edelman and blog search company Technorati Japan surveyed 213 Japanese bloggers and compared their answers with those of 821 English-language bloggers who were surveyed a year ago.

When asked “When you want to know about products, how trustworthy are [these] sources of information?”, 70.4% of Japanese bloggers said corporate websites are trustworthy or very trustworthy, while 62.9% said they find corporate news releases trustworthy or very trustworthy.

The high level of trust in corporate sources among Japanese bloggers stands in stark contrast to the attitudes of their English-language peers. Only 26.2% of English-language bloggers said corporate websites are trustworthy or very trustworthy, while a mere 4.9% said the same about news releases.

Japanese bloggers are also seemingly less opinionated and more altruistic in their reasons for blogging than their English-language counterparts.

Just 4.7% of the Japanese bloggers surveyed said the primary reason they blog is to raise visibility as an authority in their fields, whereas 33.9% English-language bloggers said this was their motivation for blogging.

The Japanese survey was conducted via a voluntary online poll by Technorati Japan from April-May 2006. Respondents were 78% male. This study makes no claim to be of a scientific nature.

In the English-language survey, 55% of those who completed the questionnaire were from the United States with the balance from Western Europe and Canada.