The Corporate Blog As an Emerging Genre of Computer-Mediated Communication: Features, Constraints, Discourse Situation
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GÖTTINGER SCHRIFTEN ZUR INTERNETFORSCHUNG Hg.: S. Hagenhoff, D. Hogrefe, E. Mittler, M. Schumann, G. Spindler, V. Wittke igital technology is increasingly impacting how we keep informed, how we communicate professionally and privately, and how we initiate and maintainD relationships with others. The function and meaning of new forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not always clear to users on The corporate blog as an the onset and must be negotiated by communities, institutions and individuals alike. Are chatrooms and virtual environments suitable for business communi- emerging genre of cation? Is email increasingly a channel for work-related, formal communication and thus „for old people“, as especially young Internet users flock to Social computer-mediated Networking Sites (SNSs)? communication: ornelius Puschmann examines the linguistic and rhetorical properties of the features, constraints, weblog, another relatively young genre of CMC, to determine its function C communication computer-mediated in private and professional (business) communication. He approaches the que- discourse situation stion of what functions blogs realize for authors and readers and argues that corporate blogs, which, like blogs by private individuals, are a highly diverse The corporate blog as an emerging genre of genre emerging an as blog corporate The in terms of their form, function and intended audience, essentially mimic key characteristics of private blogs in order to appear open, non-persuasive and Cornelius Puschmann personal, all essential qualities for companies that wish to make a positive im- pression on their constituents. Cornelius Puschmann ISSN 1863-0944 ISBN 978-3-941875-55-5 Universitätsverlag Göttingen Universitätsverlag Göttingen Cornelius Puschmann The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication: features, constraints, discourse situation This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License 3.0 “by-nd”, allowing you to download, distribute and print the document in a few copies for private or educational use, given that the document stays unchanged and the creator is mentioned. You are not allowed to sell copies of the free version. erschienen als Band 7 in der Reihe „Göttinger Schriften zur Internetforschung“ im Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2010 Cornelius Puschmann The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication: features, constraints, discourse situation Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2010 Bibliographische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliographie; detaillierte bibliographische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.ddb.de> abrufbar. Reihe Band 7 der Reihe „Göttinger Schriften zur Internetforschung“ in der qualitätsgeprüften Sparte des Universitätsverlags Göttingen. Herausgeber der Reihe: Svenja Hagenhoff, Dieter Hogrefe, Elmar Mittler, Matthias Schumann, Gerald Spindler und Volker Wittke. Anschrift des Autors Cornelius Puschmann e-mail: [email protected] Dieses Buch ist auch als freie Onlineversion über die Homepage des Verlags sowie über den OPAC der Niedersächsischen Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de) erreichbar und darf gelesen, heruntergeladen sowie als Privatkopie ausgedruckt werden. Es gelten die Lizenzbestimmungen der Onlineversion. Es ist nicht gestattet, Kopien oder gedruckte Fassungen der freien Onlineversion zu veräußern. Satz und Layout: Cornelius Puschmann Umschlaggestaltung: Martin Kaspar und Margo Bargheer © 2010 Universitätsverlag Göttingen http://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de ISBN: 978-3-941875-55-5 ISSN: 1863-0944 5 Contents 1 Introduction 11 1.1 \Wait, what's a corporate blog?" . 11 1.2 Issues of definition . 12 1.3 Methods, data and approach . 15 1.4 Preliminary theoretical considerations . 17 1.5 Aims and scope . 20 1.6 Structure of this thesis . 21 2 Formal, technical and pragmatic aspects of blogging 23 2.1 Proposing a hierarchy of community, purpose and text . 23 2.2 A classification of blogs following Herring . 25 2.2.1 Medium factors . 26 M1: Synchronicity . 27 M2: Message transmission . 29 M3: Persistence of transcript . 29 M4: Size of message buffer . 29 M5: Channels of communication . 30 M6: Anonymous messaging . 30 M7: Private messaging . 31 M8: Filtering . 31 M9: Quoting . 31 M10: Message format . 32 2.2.2 Situation factors . 33 S1: Participation structure . 35 S2: Participant characteristics . 36 S3: Purpose . 37 S4: Topic or theme . 37 S5: Tone . 38 S6: Activity . 39 2.3 Users and uses of private blogs . 40 2.3.1 Update others on activities and whereabouts . 44 2.3.2 Express opinions and influence others . 47 2.3.3 Seek others' opinion and feedback . 48 2.3.4 Thinking by writing . 49 2.3.5 Release emotional tension . 50 2.4 Blogs and the organization of time . 51 2.5 The blog as a virtual discourse situation . 53 2.6 Canonical software features of blog publishing tools . 54 6 Contents 2.7 Chronology in data and discourse.................. 56 2.8 Blog macrostructure......................... 58 2.9 Blog microstructure......................... 60 2.10 Self-directed discourse and the deictic center............ 62 2.11 Audience design........................... 65 2.12 Audience scope............................ 67 2.13 Ego blogging............................. 69 2.14 Topic blogging............................ 69 2.15 Differences in function and intended audience........... 72 2.16 Audience mismatch.......................... 74 2.17 Conversational maxims, relevance and politeness in blogs.... 74 3 The corporate blog as an emerging genre 79 3.1 Aspects of organizational communication............. 79 3.2 Issues of corporate communications on the Internet........ 80 3.3 Origins of corporate blogging.................... 82 3.4 Perceived advantages of corporate blogging............ 88 3.5 A typology of corporate blog subgenres.............. 92 3.5.1 Product blogs......................... 93 3.5.2 Image blogs.......................... 97 3.5.3 Executive blogs........................ 99 3.5.4 Employee blogs / blog hubs................. 99 3.6 A comparison of private and corporate blogs............ 100 3.7 Pragmatic aspects of corporate blogs................ 106 3.8 Flogging................................ 108 3.9 Linguistic aspects of corporate blogs................ 109 4 Corporate blogging case studies 115 4.1 One Louder (Microsoft)....................... 115 4.2 Jonathan's Blog (Sun Microsystems)................ 117 5 Discussion 123 A CBC/Corporati corpus statistics 127 7 List of Tables 1.1 CBC/Corporati statistics . 16 2.1 Medium factors of blogs according to Herring (2007) . 27 2.2 Situation factors of blogs following Herring (2007) . 35 2.3 A model of two approaches to blogging: ego blogging vs. topic blogging . 42 2.4 Conversational Maxims in Blogs . 72 3.1 Communicative actions and their parameters in corporate blogs . 91 3.2 Prounoun frequencies in CBC/Corporati, the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Business English Corpus (BEC) . 112 3.3 Frequent nouns in CBC/Corporati . 113 A.1 Blogs indexed in CBC/Corporati . 130 9 List of Figures 1.1 The GM Fastlane weblog . 11 1.2 Live Journal . 14 2.1 Discourse Model A . 24 2.2 Discourse Model B . 26 2.3 A Twitter user page . 28 2.4 Video content embedded in a blog . 30 2.5 Quoted elements in a filter blog on legal issues . 32 2.6 Blog entries in Google Reader . 33 2.7 Source code of an RSS feed . 34 2.8 A video blog (vlog).......................... 36 2.9 Comments under a blog entry . 37 2.10 The Microsoft Community Blogs hub . 38 2.11 Technorati's most blogged-about topics . 41 2.12 Reasons given for blogging in Lenhart and Fox (2006) . 43 2.13 Motivation to blog given in White and Winn (2009) . 43 2.14 A german-language travelog on life in Japan . 46 2.15 YouTube channels . 54 2.16 Creating a blog post with Wordpress . 56 2.17 MySQL data table of blog posts . 57 2.18 Archive of posts in a personal blog . 59 2.19 F-score over time in the Thomson Holidays Blog . 61 2.20 F-score over time in One Louder . 61 3.1 A simplified model of corporate communication following Horton (1995) . 80 3.2 Quantitative relation of personal, professional and corporate blog- ging according to White and Winn (2009) . 82 3.3 Early Microsoft corporate blog . 84 3.4 Functions of corporate blogs following Zerfaß (2005) . 90 3.5 Weblog traffic statistics in Wordpress . 92 3.6 A typology of corporate weblogs based on function and authorship 94 3.7 The Nike Basketball website and blog . 95 3.8 Wells Fargo's The Student LoanDown blog . 96 3.9 McDonald's Open for Discussion CSR blog . 98 3.10 Employee blog One Louder . 100 3.11 Private ego blog NC . 101 3.12 Private topic blog Ponderstorm . 103 10 List of Figures 3.13 Corporate image blog Marriot on the Move............ 105 3.14 Word cloud of issues covered in Marriot on the Move....... 106 3.15 The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs flog................. 109 3.16 Business and non-business lexis in the Business English Corpus (Nelson, 2006, p. 226)........................ 110 4.1 The weblog of Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz.... 118 11 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 \Wait, what's a corporate blog?" Whenever someone asked me over the course of my doctoral studies about the topic of my dissertation, I usually replied that I was investigating corporate blogging, a new form of web-based publishing used by companies for a range of strategic reasons. I would say this carefully and slowly, in a somewhat reluctant way probably typical of PhD students when talking about their research with the non-initiated, as if enunciating each syllable could somehow make the novel concept magically clear to my communicative partner and prevent them from asking the next, inevitable (and of course perfectly plausible) question: \Wait, what's a corporate blog?" Figure 1.1: The GM Fastlane weblog It may seem like a truism, but the emergence of digital media and the Inter- net have revolutionized the way we communicate, to the extent that a plethora 12 Introduction of new concepts have entered our daily lives and new words are only gradually finding their way into the lexicon to describe them.