Corporate Blogs Research Articles

A Corpus-Based Study of Corporate Blog: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis

Using a corpus-based multi-dimensional (MD) analysis, this paper investigates the functional linguistic variation in corporate blog (CB), and aims at identifying text types that are distinguished linguistically. Data for a self-built corpus are drawn from 41 out of 50 top ranking corporate blogs. In the multidimensional analysis, 32 linguistic features were tagged, counted and normalized. Then, the normalized frequencies of these features were used in a factor analysis, which identified six factors: (1) personal involvement narration, (2) informational production, (3) interactive persuasion, (4) abstract/impersonal style, (5) evaluative stance, (6) general information vs. technical information. The six factors were then used as predictors in a cluster analysis, through which six clusters were identified, including (1) descriptive discourse, (2) technical conversation, (3) interactive storytelling, (4) evaluative information report, (5) persuasion and (6) interactive instruction. Findings also indicate that all these different clusters (text types) identified have different communicative purposes, but share a common motive for success in business world: using corporate blogs as interactive public relations tools to gain a targeted audience and acquire long-term readers and customers to achieve their organizational goals in business world.

Teaching Evidence-Based Writing Using Corporate Blogs

Teaching problem: Students' written assignments show that they tend to list ideas rather than provide evidence-based arguments. This might be because they do not have a framework to base their arguments on. Research question: Does the communication model framework help students to write evidence-based arguments when evaluating the communicative effectiveness in corporate blogs? Situating the case: The ability to engage in argument from evidence is one of the Next Generation Science Standards for scientific and engineering practices. Thus, it is important for engineering students to know how to present evidence-based arguments. The communication model framework was introduced to provide students with a framework to base their arguments on. This framework builds on the genre-based and academic literacies approaches to teaching writing. More companies are now using corporate blogs (an open, participatory, and globally networked social media tool) to engage stakeholders directly across multiple contexts. The framework is useful in analyzing evolving genres like corporate blogs because it is not only structured but also flexible. About the case: This teaching case describes the use of the communication model framework as the basis for students' arguments. The framework was used in a general writing course for engineering students. Working in groups, the students used the framework for their oral practice critique and their critique assignment on a given piece of academic writing or corporate blog. They also had to write a reflection paper individually at the end of the course. Results: Overall, the mixed groups and international students groups made a stronger attempt to apply the framework compared to the Singaporean student groups. The students' educational backgrounds, the group dynamics within the group, and the nature of the discussions affected the level of adoption of the framework in their writing. Conclusions: This teaching case reflects the value of mixed group, face-to-face discussions, and personal reflection in teaching students evidence-based writing, and calls for more research on flexible frameworks as genres evolve.

Corporate blogging and virtual communities

A well-defined blogging strategy that includes purpose, mission and goals should be the cornerstone of any social media programme or digital marketing initiative. Understanding and locating blogging communities and the influencers in them is important to promote readership and participation. This paper describes five strategy exercises required for a successful blogging programme.

The Ability of Corporate Blog Communication to Enhance CSR Effectiveness: The Role of Prior Company Reputation and Blog Responsiveness

The purpose of this study is to determine what constitutes effective corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication in the corporate blog setting. This study examines the effects of a company's prior reputation and blog responsiveness on public perception of CSR motives, attitudes, and intention to engage in word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. The results show that prior company reputation has a strong effect on the public's interpretation of CSR motives, their attitudes towards the company, and their intentions to engage in WOM communication, while blog responsiveness influences the public's attitudes towards and perception of CSR motives. The interaction effect between prior reputation and blog responsiveness on WOM communication was confirmed, meaning that for a company with a negative reputation, responsiveness is critical when communicating CSR practices. We suggest that responding to the public's comments or questions about a company's CSR activities may convince them about the company's sincere motives whereas no response engenders suspicion toward a company's motives.

International corporate blogging practices and effects

This study assesses international corporate blogging practices and their effects on the popularity of corporate blogs in terms of comments received and incoming links. Building on the blogging practices framework by Schmidt (2007b), a theoretical model is developed incorporating cause–and–effects relationships for blog characteristics and their impact, as well as international differences. The five Hypotheses are tested using a sample of 20 German, 10 Russian and 77 U.S. corporate blogs. The results of stepwise regression analyses confirmed most hypotheses regarding effects of blog diversity, blog authenticity, blog usability, blog sophistication and networking efforts. The theoretical and practical implications of this are discussed.

The Role of Affect in Agenda Building for Public Relations

Grounded in an agenda-building framework, this experiment manipulated two dimensions of affective attributes—valence and arousal—from a corporate blog message to examine their influence on corporate reputation and stakeholder engagement. Overall, the findings showed significant valence effects on reputation and engagement, while arousal effects were only present on corporate reputation. This study adds empirical evidence to the explication of agenda building by focusing on affective attributes and by testing the compelling-arguments hypothesis concerning the role of affective attributes’ (second level) impact on object salience (first level).

The effect of web communities on consumers' initial trust in B2C e‐commerce websites

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to test the effectiveness of the mere integration of social network applications to provide a signal concerning the “trustworthiness” of an unfamiliar e‐vendor in order to enhance subsequent purchase intentions.Design/methodology/approachTo investigate the impact of web communities on consumers' initial trust beliefs (i.e. ability, benevolence and integrity), a 2×3 between‐subjects full factorial online experiment was carried out, using a fictitious web site for a gift gadgets selling company, manipulating it for inclusion or exclusion of a “social networking site”, and for inclusion or exclusion of “a corporate blog (text only blog, photo and text blog, or no blog)”. Data were obtained from 226 online shoppers.FindingsAlthough the authors could not reveal any effects of the integration of social network applications on “ability” beliefs, it was possible to demonstrate their capacity to “signal” “benevolence” and “integrity”, which in turn have a significant impact on purchase intentions. Unfamiliar e‐retailers may foster perceptions of “integrity” by utilizing text‐blogs into their web sites, but they should avoid embedding facial photos of shop representatives in the blog. If e‐retailers want to make use of “a corporate blog with facial photo”, it is recommended to combine it with the integration of a social networking site such as Facebook in order to boost perceptions of “benevolence”.Research limitations/implicationsThe simple integration of “social network applications” can affect “initial trust beliefs” towards unfamiliar e‐tailers and subsequent “purchase intentions”, but it appears essential to utilize just the right cue combination in order to obtain the desired effect. The effectiveness of integrating a social network application may vary according to the type and may affect different trust beliefs (benevolence, integrity).Originality/valueAn important issue in e‐commerce remains how trust is developed between consumers and e‐retailers. This paper investigates the use of different web communities and the influence of their integration in the commercial web site on consumers' initial trust beliefs in the online environment. The findings will help business managers to understand how social media should be used to lead to optimal results.

Pharmaceutical Personal Selling: Problems Prospects And Importance Of Strategic Relationship Marketing

In Pakistan the Pharmaceutical industry is important as it essentially and strategically operates for population well being by providing good life saving yet cost efficient healthcare products. Marketing in this sector is often done through the trained sales personnel called as Medical Representatives (Medical Reps). However the affectivity of the medical sales calls done by these sales persons in the physician's chamber is almost negligible. This research has presented a relationship model that not only can increase sales call effectiveness but also provide important managerial implications. Data was collected from medical sales persons and physicians regarding the three key dimensions of relationship marketing; the customers, the sales persons and the suppliers. The study focused to develop an optimal model for personal selling practices to develop a long term mutually beneficial relationship between sales people and physicians. A theoretical model is developed in view of the Pakistan's specific context, current environmental factors and digital and social media like community websites, face book and other corporate blogs and Medical Communities and their websites etc.

Corporate blogs as tools for consumer segmentation-using cluster analysis for consumer profiling

The collaborative web or web 2.0 as it is termed, provides several low-cost opportunities for Internet Marketing and customer relationship management. While offering numerous touchpoints for interaction with current and prospective consumers, the web also offers access to vast amounts of consumer-generated data, which can give organizations access to the consumer thought process. This article focuses on exploring opportunities for usage of corporate blogs by organizations for Consumer profiling. This can be accomplished by extracting consumer related information from the comments posted by consumers in response to the posts hosted by organizations on a corporate blog. The consumer comments can be mined to gauge individual consumer sentiment, which can be used as a basis for consumer profiling. Data mining concepts of clustering and the nearest neighbor technique, can aid allocation of consumers to respective clusters, thereby enabling prediction of behavior of new consumers as and when they enter the system.

Corporate blogs and internet marketing – Using consumer knowledge and emotion as strategic variables to develop consumer engagement

In a fiercely competitive environment, organizations that want to retain their consumers and increase consumer-brand loyalty need to focus on increasing the consumer's brand knowledge along with the consumer emotion about the brand. Our previous research already indicates that increasing consumer-brand knowledge (CBK) and emotion contributes to increased consumer perceived value in the brand, which is directly linked to greater consumer-brand loyalty, by building greater brand customer-centricity. We conceptualize an experiment to increase the knowledge level of a consumer, pertaining to brand, where we use a simulated lab environment where a set of consumers are exposed to a corporate brand blog for a fixed duration. The variation in levels of CBK is calculated. We further develop a research instrument to measure the emotion levels of consumers, pertaining to a brand, both before and after exposure to the corporate blog. Subsequent to this study, we attempt to find a correlation between variations in CBK and consumer brand emotion, which clearly indicates that as a consumer's knowledge about a product or brand increases, so does his emotional attachment with the brand. This subsequently increases the consumer adoption of, and relationship with the brand.

CRM in a Web 2.0 world: Using corporate blogs for campaign management

Customer anxiety and cutbacks are the biggest factors influencing marketing budget allocation in recent times. The collaborative web or Web 2.0 as it is termed provides several low-cost opportunities for marketing and customer relationship management (CRM). While offering numerous touchpoints for interaction with current and prospective consumers, the web also offers access to vast amounts of consumer-generated data, which can give organizations access to the consumer thought process. This paper focuses on opportunities for usage of corporate blogs by organizations for campaign management, by using the organizational posts for delivery of promotional campaigns to consumers, and further extracting consumer-related information from the comments posted by consumers in response to these posts. The consumer comments can be mined to gauge consumer sentiment and to serve as a decision support system for better segmentation and response management. In this paper, we explore the usage of a corporate blog as a CRM tool to be utilized for contributing to the CRM functionalities of campaign management, customer service and support, and support to marketing communication and product development for aiding the organization in developing consumer targeting strategies appropriately.

Towards a Model of Employee Weblog Usage

The recent rise of Web 2.0 ideas, principles, and applications has significantly affected the communication and interaction in social networks. While Web 2.0’s Internet usage and benefits have been investigated, certain questions are still unanswered: whether benefits such as enhanced collaboration and knowledge sharing also apply in an organizational context and whether there are more, still uncovered, benefits. Since research on the corporate adoption and use of Web 2.0 technologies is still in its early stages, neither qualitative nor quantitative models that could provide answers have been proposed. As a starting point for further developing this research stream, the authors collected and reviewed the literature on internal corporate blogging. Then the framework by Ives et al. (1980) was chosen to categorize the identified 25 articles for further analysis. The paper describes building a conceptual model and identifying the antecedents and consequences of employee weblog usage within corporations. The findings of the review suggest that employee blogging in corporations is a social and an organizational phenomenon. Individual perceptions and attitudes, peers, and cultures have a crucial influence on weblog usage, while the organization and its culture provide a framework.

Understanding customer experiences in online blog environments

Blogs have recently become an influential medium and have demonstrated enormous marketing power. Consumers can freely conduct ongoing information searches through this new channel. However, the credibility of blogs plays an important role in creating opportunities for positive customer experiences that can shape consumers’ product/service purchase intentions and decisions. In light of this observation, this study proposes a theoretical framework that delineates the relationship among information credibility, customer experiences, and purchase intention in the blog environment. Data collected from 468 subjects in specific corporate blogs provide support for the proposed model using partial least squares (PLS). The results indicate that information credibility is critical for facilitating customer experiences, which, in turn, is necessary to enhance purchase intention. Additionally, greater involvement with blog significantly increases the effect of customer experiences on purchase intention. The detailed theoretical and managerial implications are presented.

The Challenge of Co-Creation: Corporate Blogs and Collaborative Product Innovation

Purpose - Focusing the attention on firm-hosted online consumers communities, this paper will analyze the managerial challenges that companies have to face to leverage consumers’ creative talent involving them in innovative collaboration processes.Methodology approach - A detailed case history, whose reconstruction was based on non-participant observation. Findings – The paper clarifies some of the “soft” issues that firms have to manage when trying to support effective learning processes with their customers, focusing on the efforts that companies have to made in order to remove all the stumbling blocks that could prevent an ongoing and effective dialogue with their customers. Research implications – The paper suggests an interpretative model of pre-conditions needed to enact online collaborative product innovation, in particular focusing on: barriers to be removed and competences that firms need to develop, in order to promote, maintain and increase customer’s engagement in the exchange; benefits that have to be offered to customer in order to maintain the right level of motivation and participation.Practical implications: The paper specifies some of the main community management activities the firms should learn to governate in order to accrue the probability of their blogs’ success.

The Effects of Dialogic Communication on Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty in Corporate Blogs : Focus on Comparing This with Perceived Interactivity

The Effects of Dialogic Communication on Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty in Corporate Blogs : Focus on Comparing This with Perceived Interactivity

Hot Diggity Blog: A Cluster Analysis Examining Motivations and Other Factors for Why People Judge Different Types of Blogs as Credible

Using two-step cluster analysis this study identifies four groups of users who deem seven types of blogs (general information, media/journalism, war, military, political, corporate, and personal blogs) as highly credible. The four groups are each motivated to turn to blogs for many of the same reasons; however, some differences emerged among the groups. In addition, the four user clusters differ on demographic and political characteristics.

State of the library and information science blogosphere after social networks boom: A metric approach

A metric analysis of blogs on library and information science (LIS) between November 2006 and June 2009 indexed on the Libworm search engine characterizes the community's behavior quantitatively. An analysis of 1108 personal and corporate blogs with a total of 275,103 posts is used to calculate survival rate, production (number of posts published), and visibility via such indicators as links received, Technorati authority, and Google's PagePank. Over the study period, there was a 52% decrease in the number of active blogs. Despite the drop in production over this period, the average number of posts per blog remained constant (14 per month). The most representative blogs in the discipline are identified. The emergence of such platforms as Facebook and Twitter seems to have meant that both personal and corporate blogs have lost some of their prominence.

Assessing the Value of Corporate Blogs: A Social Capital Perspective

This three-phased study examines corporate blog use, specifically the impact and value of blogs on organizational social capital and knowledge sharing at Dell Inc., a global computer manufacturer. The impact of social-mediated Web 2.0 technologies on organizational social capital has received limited attention in scholarship, possibly because of the inevident connection to measurable economic value and newness of the technology. Our findings indicate the corporate blog can be used as a sustainable forum leading to a shared understanding of organizational roles, increased sense of group cohesiveness, improved work processes, and improved professional and personal ties among employees in the organization.

Corporate blogs as e-CRM tools – Building consumer engagement through content management

Corporate Blogs are fast emerging as new organizational tools for marketing, building brand relationships and Customer Relationship Management. This study has been conducted to analyse the ability of an organization to use its Corporate Blog as an e-CRM tool. We attempt to study the impact of brand communication (content type and volume), hosted on an organizational blog, on its ability to induce consumer engagement. Organizations can build relationships with their prospective and current consumers through posts on a Corporate Blog, and encourage them to participate by commenting on the blog, thereby stimulating consumer engagement. The variation in the organizational objective behind hosting each post on the blog is used to categorize the content posted on the blog. An exploratory study enables us to deduce the importance of content typologies in building a relationship with the customer. We are able to identify three types of content typologies – Organizational, Promotional and Relational. We further observe that Relational content hosted by an organization is able to induce greater volumes of consumer engagement (measured in terms of number of consumer comments) than any other content typology. The analysis of dependency of consumer engagement on the volume of content posted by the organization indicates a positive correlation between number of posts and volume of comments.

Content analysis of corporate blogs as a relationship management tool

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how major corporations in the USA utilize corporate blogs for building and maintaining relationships with various publics.Design/methodology/approachApplying the relationship management framework, a longitudinal content analysis of corporate blogs is conducted in 2006 and 2008. The blogs are identified by a thorough search of blogs operated by corporations listed on Fortune 500 companies or Interbrand Top 100 global brands. A systematic coding scheme is developed based on the existing research on relationship maintenance strategies and corporate communication.FindingsA growing number of major corporations in the USA have adopted blogs as a corporate communication tool and the popularity of topic‐oriented blogs appears to have increased over time. While corporate blogs tend to apply various relationship maintenance strategies, the application of such strategies tends to be concentrated on a certain type of strategies.Practical implicationsDespite the increasing adoption of the corporate blogging practice, many corporations still do not seem to harness the unique potential of a blog to the fullest extent. To maximize the relationship management efforts, practitioners should consider expanding the scope and level of relationship management strategies. For researchers, this paper proposes a new approach for examining corporate blogs as a public relations tool by applying the relationship maintenance strategy framework.Originality/valueThis paper is the first attempt to provide a longitudinal overview of the state of corporate blogs and strategies. In addition to offering descriptive information about the corporate blogging practice, this paper proposes a new research framework for studying corporate blogs.