Exploratory Study on Corporate Blogs: Potential of Corporate Blogging to Be a New Public Relations Tool

EXPLORATORY STUDY ON CORPORATE BLOGS: POTENTIAL OF CORPORATE BLOGGING TO BE A NEW PUBLIC RELATIONS TOOL

YI-JONG TSAI

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN MASS COMMUNICATION

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2006

Yi-Jong Tsai

I would like to dedicate this thesis to my parents and my sister. Thanks for their endless love and warmest support

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I especially would like to thank the following people, who have given me care,

support, and love during the preparation of this thesis. This thesis would not have been possible without them. Many thanks go to my committee chair, Professor Juan-Carlos

Molleda, who read my numerous revisions and offered me valuable guidance, and dedicated his time and energy to make this thesis a success. Also special acknowledgements go to my two other committee members, Professor Linda Hon and

Professor Melinda McAdams. I would like to thank Professor Linda Hon for her encouragement to me to start this study and providing me lists of blog research. I would like to thank Professor Melinda McAdams for helping me to revise the methodology and coding sheets by her expertise in Weblogs. Her inspirational instructions and enthusiasm in researching and teaching have been accompanied with me from start to finish of this study

I thank all my professors in the College of Journalism and Communications, for their knowledge and guidance during my master’s study in University of Florida. Special thanks go to Professor Peg Hall, Professor Meg Lamme, Professor Michael Mitrook,

Professor Linda Perry, Professor Kim Walsh-Childers and Professor Spiro Kiousis. I also thank Professor Alan Freitag from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who provided us a wonderful international public relations course in London.

I would like to thank Ai-Chih Chang, Yi-Jen Huang, Yin-Hua Chu, Ting-Yu Hsu,

Oliver Hsu, Sally Liu, Danny Tu, for helping me during the most difficult times in

writing this thesis. Without them, this thesis could not have been made possible. And special thanks go to Yun-Ting Su and Chia-Yi Cheng, for extending a helping hand when

I was desperate and always being my best friend during this long process.

I thank all my friends from my high school pals to those fabulous friends at

National Chengchi University, to those I met at the University of Florida. They are the best friends I have ever had, who have brought me endless love and joy. Thanks go to

Lun-Wei Chang, I-Hsuan Chen and Yu-Ching Tsai and Sheng-Ho Wang for always cheering me up when I feel discouraged and giving tireless supports I needed to move on.

I especially want to thank my best friends here in the College of Journalism and

Communications for their love, support, and inspiration: Chun-Hsin, Huang, Yi-Shan

Hsu, and I-Hua, Lee. I also thank my dear friends here in Gainesville for sharing my happiness and sadness, Pei-Ying Chan, Yin-Hsuan Chen, Hung-Ta Wang, Hung-Yen

Lee, Hung-Hsun Su, Jones Yen, Kirk Weng, Hsin-Ta Wu and many more.

Most of all, I would thank my father Ming-Chung Tsai, my mother Yue-Hua Liu, and my sister Yi-Lin Tsai, for their ever-lasting love, faith, and support throughout my lifetime. They are the best family in the world and have been a source of love and energy in my life.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

LIST OF TABLES...... ix

LIST OF FIGURES ...... x

ABSTRACT...... xi

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2 LITERATURE REVIEW...... 4

The Internet and Public Relations...... 4 J.E. Grunig’s Four Models of Public Relations...... 5 Websites and Public Relations...... 7 Weblogs and Public Relations...... 8 Origins and History of Blog ...... 10 Definition and Elements of Weblogs ...... 10 Origins and History of Weblogs...... 11 Charactersitics of Weblogs...... 14 Glossary of Blogging Terms...... 15 Types of Public Relations Blogging...... 16 Corporate Blogging ...... 18 Definition of Corporate Blogging ...... 19 Who blogs on Corporate Blogs?...... 20 Blogging is Gaining Ground with Corporations ...... 21 Features of Corporate Blogging ...... 22 Corporate Blogs as a Means to Foster Trust ...... 24 Principles for Public Relations Blogging ...... 25 Diffusion of Innovations...... 26 History of Diffusion Research...... 26 Elements in the Diffusion of Innovations Process ...... 27 Typology of Diffusion Research ...... 29 Innovations in Organizations...... 30 Characteristics of Organizational Innovativeness ...... 31

Research Questions...... 33

3 METHODOLOGY ...... 35

Population...... 36 Sample ...... 38 Unit of Analysis...... 39 Categories Development...... 40 Coding Sheet Construction...... 41 Time Period ...... 44 Coding Procedure and Inter-Coder Reliability...... 45 Data Analysis...... 46

4 RESULTS...... 47

Sample ...... 47 NAICS Categories ...... 48 First Timestamp, Latest Timestamp and Update Frequency...... 51 Research Question One...... 52 Adopter Categories...... 52 Industry Categories of Adopters...... 53 Research Question Two...... 55 Position in the Workplace of Corporate Blogs Authors...... 55 Motivation ...... 55 Communication Attributes ...... 56 Update Frequency...... 58 Correlation Findings...... 59 Research Question Three...... 59 Personal Nature ...... 59 Corporate Narrative Features ...... 60 Topics Discussed on Corporate Blogs...... 62 Correlation Findings...... 64

5 DISCUSSION...... 65

Corporate Adoption Behavior on Blogs ...... 67 Adopter Category ...... 67 Diffusion of Corporate Blog...... 68 Corporate Blog Content...... 70 Motivations and Communication Attributes ...... 70 Personal Nature and Narrative Features ...... 72 Topic Discussed on Corporate Blog...... 74 Corporate Statement ...... 76 Implication for Online Public Relations...... 77 Limitations and Directions for Future Work ...... 79

vii

APPENDIX

A BLOGGING GLOSSARY...... 83

B CEO BLOGS LIST...... 85

C CODEBOOK FOR CONTENT ANALYSIS...... 91

D CODING SHEET FOR CONTENT ANALYSIS ...... 98

E CODING SHEET FOR CONTENT ANALYSIS (2) ...... 101

LIST OF REFERENCES...... 104

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 109

viii

LIST OF TABLES

Table page

4-1. The Breakdown of Sample Set by NAICS Categories...... 50

4-2. The Occurrence of Corporate Blogs...... 51

4-3. The Time Period of Latest Blog Entry ...... 52

4-4. Adopter Categories...... 53

4-5. Industry Categories by Adopters ...... 54

4-6. The Position in the Workplace of Corporate Blogs Authors...... 55

4-7. Motivations for Corporate Blogging ...... 56

4-8. Communication Attributes of Corporate Blogs...... 57

4-9. Personal Nature...... 60

4-10. Corporate Narrative Features...... 62

4-11. Writing Topics of Corporate Blogs ...... 63

4-12. Correlations Between Writing Topics and Use of Human Voices ...... 64

B-1. CEO Blogs List...... 85

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

4-1. Growth of Coporate Blogs ...... 51

5-1. Innovation Decision Periods of Corporate Blogs...... 69

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Mass Communication

EXPLORATORY STUDY ON CORPORATE BLOGS: POTENTIAL OF CORPORATE BLOGGING AS A NEW PUBLIC RELATIONS TOOL

Yi-Jong Tsai

August 2006

Chair: Juan-Carlos Molleda Major Department: Journalism and Communications

The rise of Weblogs is seen as the next generation of online communication and attarcts extensive attention from mass media and publics. Yet, because most research about Weblogs has been done in journalism, marketing and polical science fields, little is known about the public relations realm. Thus, this paper shifts the attention on the use of

Weblogs from political to corproate setting exploration. The purpose of this study aims to provide (1) the adopting behavior of Weblogs as a communication tool among corporations, (2) the current state and narrative features of corporate blogs, and (3) the implications for public relations in corporate blogging.

Three research questions were formed based on previous studies of diffusion of innovation, celebrity and organizational blogs. The results showed that corporate blogs are mainly used by information and professional-related industries. Also, the industry categories have become diversified in the late majority and laggards adopter groups. This study found the motivation of corporate top executives start to blog is to share

infromation and industry insights and most of corporate bloggers possess a general

knowledge of required communication attributes for running Weblogs. Overall, corporate

blogs demostrate lower level in self expression than celerbrity blogs do. Yet study result

supported the presence of human voice- conversational style communication and the

practice of speaking in an optimisic and postive tone was strong on corporate blogs.

Finally, the study indicated that corpoate blogs tend to inform their audience of useful information and industry insights by one-way communication rather than implementing two-way discussions.

This research intends to help both public relations researchers and practitioners understand corporations’attitudes toward the adoption of corporate blogs in

communication and its implications on online relationship building. The study indicated charateristics of Weblogs offer a great potential in faciliating symmetrical communication and building and retaining trust among segemented publics than do formal Websites and newsletters in the corporate context.

xii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

The invention of the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) has changed traditional communications greatly. Thanks to its innovative and universal

communication features, the Internet has become a dominant communication medium.

With the wide acceptance of the Internet as a mainstream medium, governments,

non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations have all become aware of the

importance of using the Internet as a communication tool to reach out to their key

publics. The transforming Internet technology brings both opportunities and challenges to

public relations professionals. Scholars advocate the concept of “conversation” between

organizations and their key publics as an imperative (Kelleher & Miller, 2006; Kent &

Taylor, 1998; Seltzer, 2005). From the perspective of these scholars, traditional

communication models have gradually changed as online communication continuously

evolves. The breadth of Internet communications is demonstrated in the variety of

available formats, ranging from e-mail and bulletin board systems (BBS) to instant

message programs such as MSN Messenger and the most recent Weblogs. Therefore,

keeping open dialogue is a strategic and proactive approach for organizations to nurture

mutually beneficial relationships with their stakeholders.

The rise of blogs is seen as the next generation of online communication. Blogs

grow almost daily, and the increasing popularity of these Internet communication forums

lead to the term “blog” being selected as the 2004 word of the year by

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. Harvard Business Review also listed blogs as one of

1 2

“breakthrough ideas for 2005” and claimed that the fluid blogosphere is uncontrolled, generating more participation and “gaining the power to influence what people think”

(Mohanbir, 2005. p. 39). Public relations professionals also recognize the impact of blogs and consequently engage in online communication more proactively than simply using the Internet as a one-way communication tool. For instance, major corporations have started to create their own blogs, recognizing the advantage of tapping into the blogosphere to build relationships with their stakeholders. The goals of corporate blogs include enhancing the corporate brand, promoting products, and improving the public’s perception of the corporation. Whether blogging has changed corporate discourse remains unclear; however, the effectiveness of blogs as communication tools has been demonstrated, setting exemplars for future business communication.

Allowing for direct and open dialogues with publics, corporate blogs provide an effective means to build trust and credibility with publics. Robert Scoble’s development of blogging for Microsoft earned him the name of “Chief humanising officer” (“Chief humanising officer,” 2005). However, the mass media and general public question the use of corporate blogs because of accountability and disclosure concerns. The New York

Times reported that Wal-Mart enlisted bloggers in a public relations campaign and that identical messages were later distributed by Edelman Public Relations firm (Barbaro,

2006), demonstrating the vulnerability of information presented in blog forms.

As more corporations jump on the blogging bandwagon, one of the biggest challenges inherent in creating these blogs is presenting corporate messages in a responsible and ethical way. Public relations practitioners have to be more responsible for their output in order to meet the expectations of truth and accountability. While the

popularity of blogging is increasing, there is still limited academic research on the

application of blogs in the field of public relations. Searches of “Weblog,” “Weblogs,”

“blog,” “blogs,” “blogger,” and “blogging” within Academic Search Premier, Business

Source Premier and Communication & Mass Media Complete databases yields research papers primarily focused on how blogs impact journalism, political science, and marketing. There are far fewer scholarly publications reporting research on blogs in the realm of public relations, which is covered by journals such as Journal of Public

Relations, Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Quarterly, Public

Relations Review, and Public Relations Tactics. Among these publications, Public

Relations Tactics has the most comprehensive, but still limited, coverage and focuses

most on discussions of Weblogs. From the period of March 2004 to January 2006, the

journal included 13 articles related to Weblogs. Discussions of Weblogs are extensive,

addressing topics ranging from blogging glossaries to new communication strategies via

blogs to employee law issue related to blogs. Obviously, the blogging phenomenon

attracts the attention of mainstream media and different types of organizations; however,

there is a need for more academic publication on blogs in the area of public relations.

Thus, this study aims to address following issues: 1) the adopting behavior of

Weblogs as communication tool among corporations, 2) the current state and narrative

features of corporate blogs, and 3) the implications for public relations in corporate

blogging.

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

The Internet and Public Relations

The Internet initially became commercial and publicly accessible when Netscape released the first web browser in November 1994 (Wikipedia contributor, 2006a). Since that time, the information superhighway has provided free and instant access to vast quantities of information and has connected people worldwide. The most distinguished feature of the Internet is the high level of interaction that affords users. The Internet empowers receivers to interact with senders and facilitates dialogues between the parties

(Kelleher & Miller, 2006; Kent & Taylor, 1998; Seltzer, 2005). Unlike other traditional

media such as print journalism and television, the Internet allows people to actively seek

information and permits its users to voice their perspectives and even influence public

opinion in cyberspace.

The Internet also offers low-cost and unlimited potential for disseminating

messages in advertising, marketing, and public relations. The digital media revolution has

allowed for online conferences, email news alerts, and multimedia news release

distribution, which are just a few of the potentials made possible through Internet

communication. In the mid-1990s, major corporations started to build up official

corporate Websites for journalists and the general public to gather information. Corporate

Websites, functioning like an online news kit, became additional channels for

corporations to communicate with their stakeholders. Meanwhile, public relations

practitioners surf the Internet to tap the masses of information and monitor the social

4 5 environment in an effort to adjust and improve their organizations’ communication strategies.

J.E. Grunig’s Four Models of Public Relations

Grunig and Hunt (1984) developed four well-known models of public relations based on the evolving stages of public relations history. These models were built to help organizations adapt to environmental requirements by establishing mutually beneficial relationships with their key publics in terms of management function. Incorporating the nature of communication (one-way communication vs. two-way communication) and the purposes of communication (persuasive or asymmetrical vs. symmetrical), Grunig and

Hunt (1984) identified the four modern models of public relations, which include the press agentry and publicity model, the public information model, and the two-way asymmetrical and two-way symmetrical models.

The press agentry/ publicity model demonstrates one-way asymmetrical communication between senders and receivers for the purpose of propaganda. In this model, information typically flows from the mass media to the receiver. Truth is not an essential component of this model; thus, press agentry usually results in conflict within the media (Grunig, 1989).

Also categorized as one-way asymmetrical communication, the public information model is used to disseminate information, and therefore, truth is an important quality of this model. Public relations practitioners utilizing this model are often referred to as

“journalists-in -residence” (Grunig & Hunt, 1984, p. 35). Compared with the press agentry model, the public information model tends to foster more harmonious relationships with the media, though it still attempts to control the media through the agenda building process. Both press agentry and public information are one-way models

6 of public relations, and these communication programs are not based on strategic research planning.

The two-way asymmetrical model employs scientific persuasion. Communication in this model is two-way, from sender to receiver, with the receiver providing feedback.

To help organizations meet their objectives, this model incorporates theory and research.

Although the public relations programs are based on feedback and evaluation of attitudes of their targeted publics, J. Grunig and L. Grunig (1992) stated that “practitioners who follow the two-way asymmetrical model use feedback from relevant publics to design persuasive messages to manipulate the behavior of the publics” (p. 286). In other words, the organization’s purpose is still largely persuasive in the two-way asymmetrical communication model.

The two-way symmetrical model, which is actually considered “the ideal model,” emphasizes mutual understanding in public relations. Grunig (1992) described the two-way symmetrical model as “public relations efforts that are based on research and evaluation and that use communication to manage conflict and to improve understanding with strategic publics” (p.18). Believing that symmetrical communication is fundamental to excellent communication management, J. Grunig and L. Grunig (1992) claimed that symmetrical public relations programs are not only the most effective, but also the most ethical of the four models.

There are two significant aspects of the two-way symmetrical model. First, the two-way symmetrical model enables organizations to be more effective. In addition, two-way communication allows for the free exchange of information between systems, such as organizations, publics, managements, and employees. Second, the two-way

7 symmetrical model encourages organizations to be more ethical. By promoting more mutual trust and increasing dialogues, this model strengthens the organization-public relationship. The symmetrical model provides more equitable dialogues with the publics, and the organization’s communication is likely to be more effective when influence flows two ways. The primary goal of feedback in this model is to design messages indicating that “both parties are capable of being persuaded to modify their attitudes or behaviors as a result of the public relations activity” (Harrison, 1999, p. 2).

Grunig (1992) defined the two-way models as professional practice because public relations in two-way communication model use formative studies to evaluate targeted public’s perceptions of organizations and then create a symmetrical dialogue with their publics. The advent of Internet and Web-based communication has transformed public relations and facilitated the practice of ethical and effective two-way communication model.

Websites and Public Relations

Since the World Wide Web was introduced to the general public and began to be used in organizations in the mid 1990, scholars have studied the Web’s characteristics and its impact and implications with reference to public relations. Research found that the

Internet has changed the traditional way of organizational public communications and has allowed for more interactions between organizations and publics. Heath (1998) examined the Internet and Web from an issue management perspective and determined that they provide an ideal platform for public discourse, allowing everyone to engage in an open dialogue in cyberspace.

Organizations use the Internet to expand their scope of communication, reach more audiences, and develop strategic communication plans, including crisis communication

response. Kent and Taylor (1998) emphasized the dialogic potential that Internet offers

and suggested public relations practitioners should start conversations and build relations

with Internet publics through Web-based communications niches. Similarly, Kent, Taylor

& White (2003) claimed that organizations, both for-profit and non-profit, should

understand their dialogic capacity and being responsive with their stakeholders. The

feedback mechanism in online communication is essential because it inherently deals with and allows for the dialogue that occurs.

To further assess the potential of Web-based communications, Jo and Kim (2003) investigated Web characteristics in relationship building. Their study confirmed that interactivity has a significant effect on relationship building and that the capability for interactivity distinguishes the Internet from traditional media and provides opportunities for public relations practitioners to create a more balanced dialogue between their organizations and the key publics they would like to target. On the other hand, the rise of new types of Web-based communications necessitates that public relations professionals make changes to accommodate them. From electronic mail (e-mail) to the most recent

Weblogs (blogs), public relations professionals consistently attempt to explore the potential advantages of employing cutting-edge online communication tools.

Weblogs and Public Relations

Currently, Weblog (Blog) is a growing field of study, and research pertaining to corporate blogs remains in its infancy relative to assessments of other aspects of online communications. Previous research of the application of the Internet in public relations mainly focused on corporate Website features and the Internet’s dialogic function and interactivity (Kent & Taylor, 1998; Kent et al., 2003; Jo & Kim, 2003). Beginning in late

2004, however, scholars’ research interest shifted from Websites to Weblogs. Owing to

9 the 2004 U.S. Presidential election and the war in Iraq, blogs have become more prominent and have demonstrated a profound influence in participatory communication, including raising public awareness of current events and at times resulting in heated debate in the public sphere while effectively reconstructing the relationships between organizations and publics and journalism and target audiences. (Balnaves, Mayrhofer &

Shoesmith, 2004; Hiebert, 2005). In 2004’s U.S. Presidential election, the use of blogs proliferated, creating phenomenal effects. Scholars and professionals therefore predict that blogging will become a new communication tool for public relations practitioners to facilitate dialogue and manage relationship with key publics (Lawson-Borders & Kirk,

2005).

Blogs are similar to Websites in terms of their capacity and capability for high interactivity. According to Balnaves et al. (2004), what makes blogs different from

Websites is that they address unique topics that do not fit into the context of traditional media. Moreover, the “authoring partnership” (p. 196) provides an added dimension of interactivity. In other words, the interactive nature of blogs allows more audience participation and distinguishes blogs from other Web-based communications.

Trammell and Kiousis (2005) studied the agenda-setting function between bloggers and readers. Their study revealed that there is a positive correlation between Weblog interactivity and salient agenda-setting. Seltzer (2005) conducted a content analysis of 50 environmental Weblogs to identify their dialogue potential in relationship building, and the analysis indicated that Weblogs could incorporate the existing dialogue principles of traditional Websites to build relationships online. Consequently, the personalized form of

communication in blogs has been found to correlate positively with levels of trust and

satisfaction in organization-public relationships (Kelleher & Miller, 2006).

Professional publications such as Public Relations Tactics also have also discussed

the blog phenomenon and implications for public relations practitioners. Trufelman (2005)

described a blog as a form of “consumer-generated media” and suggested that blogs

allow media consumers to have more media outlets than ever before. Key (2005) also

pointed out that Internet technology challenged old public relation models and noted that

there is a need to recognize communication trends in this field. In the blogosphere,

comment feedback mechanism, and candid disclosure all act as impetuses for the start of

dialogue (Burley, 2005). For these reasons, knowing the tone and content of major blogs and their impacts on organizations is important for practitioners (Albrycht, 2004;

Gulniven, 2004; Mateas, 2004).

Origins and History of Blog

Definition and Elements of Weblogs

A blog, which is a shortened version of Weblog, is a regularly updated online publication (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus & Wright, 2004; Trammell, 2004). Currently there is no single and unambiguous definition of what a blog is, because the blogs are still developing and evolving. Herring et al. (2004) defined blogs as “frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence” (p. 1). Jorn

Barger, the first person to use “blog” as a term, gave the following definition for a blog and the blogging format:

a webpage where a Weblogger (sometimes called a blogger, or a pre-surfer) 'logs' all the other webpages she finds interesting. The format is normally to add the newest entry at the top of the page, so that repeat visitors can catch up by simply reading down the page until they reach a link they saw on their last visit (Barger, 1999, para. 1).

Based on the entry feature, Trammell (2004) defined Weblogs as “Web pages that

are updated on a regular basis, and are often likened to online diaries” (p. 2). Balnaves et

al. (2004) describe Weblogs as a form of citizen-based media because “they are a much

more intimate form of communication” (p. 195). The development and growing

popularity of blogs has lead to the rise in new terminology derivatives, including

“blogger” and “blogsophere”. The blogger is the author/host who runs the blog, and the term blogsophere refers to “the universe of bloggers who link to new sites and each other” (Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005, p. 548).

The emergence and popularity of blogs demonstrates how quickly information travels around the world in this day and age. The topics addressed by blogs vary from personal diaries to political campaigns, media programs, and corporate statements.

Politics is one of the most popular topics in the blogsophere. Blogs feature the use of hyperlinks, trackbacks, and comments, allowing for public access to discussions. By providing links to other sites as well as allowing for instant commentary, blogs enable like-minded people to exchange information and interact with one another more easily and instantly. Trammel (2004) identifies the standard elements of a Weblog as including posts, date-time stamps, “permalinks,” archives, and hyperlinks. Other non-standard but optional blog elements are trackbacks, comments, and blogrolls.

Origins and History of Weblogs

The earliest blog can be traced back to 1996 when Dave Winer created a site which

had a format similar to that of today’s Weblogs. The term “Weblog” was first coined by

Jorn Barger in 1997 as a reference to online journals (Herring et al., 2004). In recent years, the blog format has been viewed as a new type of online communication due to the added element of everyone being able to participate in conversation thus allowing various

people’s opinions to hold equal weight in the blogsophere. Blogs change the way of traditional communication, from mass media to citizens’ media, allowing every individual has the opportunity to create a blog, express his/her point of view, and let those who view the blog participate in the conversation.

As of December 2005, the number of online users in the United States reached 200 million, which is 68.2 percent of the entire population (Internet World Stats, 2006). Out of these online users, one out of 10 creates his or her own blog, according to the report of

Internet Activity by Per Internet (Pew Internet, 2005). The growing population of bloggers indicates that blogs are gaining public notice and have started to be adopted by

Internet users. According to Technorati (2006), a real-time search engine that keeps track of Weblogs, at the time of this writing, there were 30.5 million sites and 2.1 billion links

in the blogsophere. By the end of 2004 blogs had begun to “establish themselves as a key

part of online culture” (Rainie, 2005, p. 1). A collaborative research by the Pew Internet

and American Life Project (2005) revealed a rapidly increasing readership in the

blogosphere in the United States. There were 32 million blog readers and over eight

million online users who maintained their blogs at the end of 2004, which represented 27

percent and 7 percent of the online population respectively. In the spring of 2003, blog

readership consisted of only 11 percent of Internet users; however, the readership grew

up to 27 percent by November 2004. There was a 58 percent leap in blog readership in

2004. While this report clearly indicates that blogs in the United States are getting more attention from the public, corporations, and mainstream media than ever before, it is noteworthy that only 38 percent of internet users know exactly what a blog is and that 62

percent Internet users are not sure what the term “blog” means.

The rise of blogs has been regarded as a phenomenon of the civil society facilitated by new communication technology. Scholars consider the aftermath of 9/11(Herring et al.,

2004), the war in Iraq (Balnaves et al., 2004; Herring et al., 2004; Hiebert, 2005) and the

2004 U.S. Presidential election (Hiebert, 2005; Jensen 2003; Lawson-Borders & Kirk,

2005) influential in spurring the extensive use of Weblogs. According to Balnaves et al.

(2004), the asymmetrical information during the Iraq war caused Iraqis, American troops, and journalists to use the Internet to “find ways to have a voice”(p. 198). Hiebert (2005) also pointed out that new communication technology stimulated public debates and ultimately proved that the governmental framing was wrong. Under those circumstances,

Weblogs have more transparency and inspire more dialogue and participation, thus causing them to become a crucial communication medium.

Blogs were initially used in political elections starting in 2002 (Lawson-Borders &

Kirk, 2005) and have became a crucial medium for political debate (Hiebert, 2005; Trippi,

2004). According to Jensen (2003), bloggers have been credited with inciting the inflamed debate surrounding the Iraq war and also for promoting the popularity of

Howard Dean in the 2004 U.S Presidential election. Democratic senator Howard Dean used the blog as one of his election tools to build and foster relationships with his supporters in 2003. “Blog for America” created an unprecedented success, helping

Howard Dean gained financial and political support at the grassroots level. According to

Joe Trippi (2004), Dean’s campaign manager, the success of Dean’s political campaign was attributed to the authencity of voice afforded by blogs. All blog readers know “there

[is] a real person on the other end,” (p. 142) and this authentic voice is the featured writing style of blogs. Trippi (2004 ) contends that blogs have the power to “turn the

14 audience to the speaker” (p. 144). Moreover, the blogshpere is more transparent than any other traditional medium because the instant and massive hyperlinks allow readers to fact-check, remark, and correct mistakes and inaccuracies that the host of the blog may have made. With the increasing popularity of blogging, different types of organizations, including universities, have started using blogs to communicate with their stakeholders.

For instance, Michael M. Crow, the President of Arizona State University, started his blogs on December 1, 2005, blogging about school policy issues at the university

(http://www.michaelcrow.net/).

Characteristics of Weblogs

Scholars agreed that Weblogs are more responsive than Websites (Seltzer, 2005) and have higher interactivity (Tramell & Kiousis, 2005). Gill (2004) indicated the primary characteristics of a blog include:

1. Reverse chronological journaling (format). 2. Regular, date-stamped entries (timeliness). 3. Links to related news articles, documents, and blog entries within each entry (attribution) 4. Archived entries (old content remains accessible). 5. Links to related blogs (blogrolling). 6. RSS or XML feed (ease of syndication). 7. Passion (voice). (p. 2)

In addition to structural characteristics, what makes blogs powerful is the presence of “human voice” or authentic voices (Gill, 2004; Kelleher & Miller, 2006; Trippi, 2004).

The concept of human voice in blogs means a “natural, direct and informal voice”

(Wackå, 2005, para. 3). The conversational form gives blog readers the sense that the messages are more personalized. Also, the “authoring partnership” (Balnaves et al., 2004, p. 196) expands public dialogue. Smudde (2005) emphasized that the dialogue is the essence of blogs because people participate in the communication and exchange

messages about various topic through blogs. Furthermore, the use of hyperlinks and

blogrolls widen the scope of available discussion topics.

Glossary of Blogging Terms

The emergence of blogs have brought new media terms to Internet users. The term

“blog” can be used as a verb as well as a noun. The act of adding an entry is known as

“blogging,” (Gill, 2004) and people who run blogs are referred to as bloggers. A post is

the main body of the blog, and its contents are usually in text format. The blogroll refers

to “a list of links to other blogs” (Trammell, 2004, p. 12). According to Trammell (2005),

comments and trackbacks are feedback mechanisms. Comments allow readers to post

their thoughts on original authors’ blogs. Similarly, trackbacks are also feedbacks;

however, they are posted on readers’ own blogs. That is, readers are motivated by reading

someone’s blog, and they response to it by posting remarks on their own blogs. While citing someone’s blogs, trackback will automatically notify the original author that his/her blogs are referenced by other people. The use of trackback makes linking to other

blogs easy, and bloggers can use trackback linking to other people’s blogs to view those discussions. In short, trackback is a list of other blogs to refer to and usually creates larger discussions than comments.

Permalinks, short for permanent link, are permanent uniform resource locators

(URLs) link to Weblogs archives. Once the blog content is created, the URL link to it is stored in the database and remains unchanged regardless of whether the title of the post is removed or changed. Permalink is useful when blog archives grow to a considerable number of pages. Permalinks enable readers to find specific information within blogs, and links to blog posts are permanently valid. Category is a label of posts, photos and links. It classifies similar topics and discussions into the same category. Category helps

16 blog readers save time to sort out interesting topics, and bloggers can choose whether they want their blogs to be “tagged” or not. According to Sifry (2006), a tagging service enables “bloggers to associate their posts with topics, and to make it easy for people to find interesting posts on a given subject” (para. 9). Tag is an increasing trend in blogosphere. Bloggers can choose a most relevant subject according to their blogs content then “tag” their blogs. Tag service makes readers to find popular blogs in the topics they are interested in.

In addition to basic communication function elements, content managing tools are developed to meet the needs of the growing numbers of blogs. To get content distributed widely and in a timely manner to readers, content feed tools such as RSS (Really Simple

Syndication), Atom and XML (Extensible Markup Language) are developed to deliver readers the latest headlines and updated blog contents. Other blog glossary terms are compound vocabulary from existed media terms, such as podcasting (comes from iPod and broadcasting), moblog (comes from mobile and Weblog), and flog (fake blogs). See

Appendix A for a more detailed glossary of blogging terms.

Types of Public Relations Blogging

Krishnamurthy (2002) classified four basic types of blogs, including online diaries, support groups, enhanced column, and collaborative content creation (as cited in Herring et al., 2004). Smudde (2005) analyzed blogs types in an organizational context, basing his five categories of blogs on the topics discussed as well as who creates the blog and this study divides public relations blogs into five types:

Corporate blogs: This type of blogs, also known as business blogs, are meant to support and achieve organizations’ specific goals. Blogs writers are industry insiders, from employees to top managers, including company presidents and Chief Exectutive

Officers (CEOs). Famous executive blogging bosses are the vice chairman of General

Motors, the president of Sun Microsystems, and the president of marketing of Boeing

Commercial Airlines. Smudde (2005) analyzed the various reasons why corporate blogging is gaining ground in the business world and contended that this phenomenon is due to “the presence of top management, [which] make this blog type attractive and useful” ( p.36).

Personal/ Individual blogs: People blog their diaries online to share feelings, thoughts and experiences. According to Smudde (2005), this type of blog is opinionated and hyperlinks to external Internet sources are abundant. In this regard, personal blog is also the most potent type in influencing a company’s image and reputation.

Political blogs: When discussing the topic of blogs, many people initially think of political blogs, which were used extensively in the 2004 Presidential election and have significant impacts on campaign communications. More and more political candidates have implemented blogs as a tool for campaign communication.

Publication-based blogs: According to Smudde’s (2005) definition, typical bloggers of this format are editors, journalists, or freelancers. Bloggers express opinions without editorial constraint and provide immediate news stories. This kind of blog is perceived as professional, because the bloggers’ profession allow them have established knowledge in “serving news-gathering purpose” (p.36).

Industry blogs: This type of blogs is precision-focused on a specific area, topic and industry. Industry blogs are characterized by bloggers that usually present authorative and influential opinions on the topics discussed (Smudde, 2005). By providing

accountability tracking for articles and related subjects, bloggers impact and sometimes

change readers’ initial thoughts.

Corporate Blogging

Bill Gates, chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, has discussed how blogging is

going to be a fad, because it is” very easy to communicate” medium (Stevenson, May 21,

2004). The anticipated rise of blogging as a business communication tool is gaining

ground with corporations. The blogging fad actually poses both opportunities and threats

to corporations. The cover story “Blogs will change your business” of the May 2, 2005 issue of Business Week reported the increasing fad of blogs, discussed the feasibility of

corporate blogging, and predicted that business blogging with provide opportunities for

corporations (Baker & Green, 2005). On the contrary, Forbes reported that attack blogs are rapidly expanding in the blogosphere and can destroy corporate brands and reputation

(Lyons, 2005).

Seeing that over 75,000 new Weblogs are created every day (Sifry, 2006), corporations have begun to consider blogging as the next big step in corporate communications strategy to promote organizations’ businesses, reputation, and visibility.

At the same time, major corporations also see the numbers of employees’ blogs increased rapidly (Keller & Miller, 2006). This trend encourages corporations to start thinking of using blogs as a way of reach out and obtain direct feedback from their key constituencies. Within corporations, blogs are used in internal communication and as knowledge-sharing tools. Hewlett-Packard and International Business Machines

Corporation are examples of companies that utilize blogs for these purposes (Jones,

2005). Externally, blogs present a corporate statement to communicate with publics and improve corporate image.

High ranking managers in Sun Microsystems, General Motors, and Boeing have all

entered the blogosphere (Larson & Smart, 2005). Furthermore, blogs that serve a corporate objective are gaining ground among corporations in different industries.

However, the use of blogs in the corporate setting is met with both positive and negative opinions. People with positive viewpoints see blogs as being more credible, because they offer fact-checking mechanism by peer bloggers and also allow for more independent blog content. On the contrary, some people think that the uncontrollable content of blogs may amplify negative information about a company and result in corporate rumors spreading in the blogosphere.

Definition of Corporate Blogging

According to Wackå (2006a), the definition of a corporate blog is “a blog published by, or with the support of, an organization to reach that organization's goals” (para. 8).

Smudde (2005) regards the corporate blog as “a hybrid of the personal blog,” which are” fairly new and feature the insights, assessments, commentary and other disclosure devoted to a single company” (p. 3). Debbie Weil (2005), the author of The Corporate

Blogging Book, pointed out that corporate blogs are written by someone hired especially for that job or by a small group within a company that produces a document similar to an e-newsletter, not really a corporate blog (as cited in “Blog as Marketing,” 2005). Unlike corporate Websites in the mid-1990s, corporate blogs incorporate corporate executives’ viewpoints (Marken, 2005), monitor and maintain contents, and facilitate collaborative communication through blogs (Smudde, 2005). With the exception of the corporate executive viewpoints/voice portion, good corporate blogs update information frequently and consistently, often at least once weekly (Marken, 2005). However, from a business standpoint, it seems impractical that corporate leaders spend more time updating their

blogs than on their job duties. Therefore, Marken (2005) suggested that an effective CEO

blog post consists of “executives writ[ing] out two or three key points which are viewed

and messaged by a blog-savvy PR staff member”( pp. 32-33).

Who blogs on Corporate Blogs?

Media-savvy corporations have started to blog on their industry blogs. A famous example of corporate blogs might be Robert Scoble’s site

(http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/). Scoble works for Microsoft and writes a personalized blog about technical issues related to the software business. He provides commentary on

Microsoft with both praises and critiques in his personal blogs. Due to a high degree of autonomy, credibility and transparency, Scoble’s blogs changed some people’s perceptions about Microsoft. The use of blogs by organizations is believed to add new voices and vitality to the medium as bloggers’ opinions are important in the public sphere.

Corporations started to operate blogs in 2004 in an effort to manage relationships with their customers and employees. Examples of senior management bloggers are General

Motors’ Fastlane blog (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/) created by GM’s vice chairman Bob

Lutz, Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan) by president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, Inc., Boeing’s blog

(http://www.boeing.com/randy/) by Randy Baseler, vice president of marketing for

Boeing commercial airplanes, and Richard Edelman’s blog

(http://www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/) by president and chief executive officer of

Edelman public relations firm (PR Wiki, 2006a). See Appendix B for more information about corporate leaders who are currently blogging.

Blogging is Gaining Ground with Corporations

Due to low-cost publication and the capacity for instant dissemination of information, Marken (2005) contends that blogs provide organizational management with an effective way to practice two-way communication with audiences. Scholars have also confirmed that Weblogs have the potential to facilitate open dialogues (Seltzer, 2005;

Tramell, 2004) and build trust and satisfaction in organization-public relationships

(Kelleher & Miller, 2006). According to Sifry (2006), the blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was in 2003; this explosive growth has made mass media and the public pay more attention to Weblogs. The increasing number of blog readers occupying 27 of percent Internet users (32 millions) also makes blogs become an influential alternative medium outlet than traditional media (Rainie, 2005).

A study conducted by Johnson and Kaye (2004) found that Weblog users rated blogs as being more credible than traditional media. Research results revealed that blogs’ capacity for peer review, such as providing trackbacks and hyperlinks, act to raise the credibility score for blogs and decrease the likelihood of content being controlled.

Habermann (2005) conducted a survey of 415 bloggers and found 40.2 percent of them used blogs as an alternative source of business news and information. Similarly, a trust barometer report by Edelman public relations firm revealed that Weblogs have become

“extremely/very credible” sources for information about companies as reported by 12 percent of the sample in the United States in the 2006 survey (2006 Edelman Trust

Barometer, 2006). Habermann (2005) suggested that information provided through blogs has the potential to balance the information published in the mainstream media.

Moreover, blogs present in a conversational form of communication, and the human quality of voice makes readers feel that the blog author is talking directly to them.

Smudde (2005) described blogging as a “virtual word-of-mouth communication” (p. 2).

The concept of human voice in blogs is described as a quality that differentiates blogs from other media (Balnaves et al., 2004). Seltzer (2005) pointed out how Weblogs, unlike

official corporate Websites and journalist blogs, do not undergo prior examination or editorial reviews of content. Kelleher and Miller (2006) reviewed previous research of conversational human voice in public relations theory and practice and concluded that openness of dialogue, welcoming conversational communication, providing prompt feedback, communicating with a sense of humor, admitting mistakes, treating others as human, and providing links to competitors are all aspects highlighted in corporate communication. Providing juxtaposing posts and hyperlinks can increase a blog’s credibility and sometimes change readers’ thoughts.

Features of Corporate Blogging

The high traffic on corporate blog sites attracts mass media attention, and as a result, other companies tap into the possibility of operating corporate blogs. A number of corporate blogs feature virtual face-to-face communication and human voice writing style, demonstrating what Grunig advocated as an ethical and effective scenario in public relations practice to “use of symbols to communicate impressions of an organization”

(Grunig, 1993, p. 129, as cited in Smudde, 2005, p.36). Hence, corporate blogging is viewed as a potentially very effective tool in implementing two-way communication in terms of organizational communication goals.

Marken (2005) suggested that an effective CEO/business blog should reflect the viewpoints and voice of executives but not of anyone else. As Smudde (2005) pointed out, corporate blogs are attractive to blog readers because they are representative of top management. Readers are interested in reading the authentic ideas of corporate executives.

Accordingly, corporate blogs should avoid including irrelevant and boring corporate statements. Grossman (2004) insisted that blogs have “a unique, human voice that communicates a distinct point of view” (as cited in Seltzer, 2005, p. 2). The inclusion of high-ranking executives’ viewpoints in corporate blogs represents scholars’ emphasis of

“human voice” in Weblogs writing. In this way, the personalities of blogs writers are conveyed, which is “the essential element of Weblogs writing” (Winter, 2003, as cited in

Seltzer, 2005, p. 2).

More importantly, long-term commitment is indispensable if corporations decide to start their blogs. Hence, short, clear and frequent blog entries are suggested for effectively running a blog. Also, key contact information is necessary to create a positive dialogue relationship between organizational key publics (Marken, 2005). Topics of corporate Weblogs are various and extensive with corporate leaders discussing solutions to problems they have encountered, asking readers’ opinions about new corporate policy, articulating business activities, or sharing their personal thoughts of corporate visions on the blogs. Harris and Barnes (2005) studied leadership stories and asserted that stories can communicate complex concepts in unforgettable ways to readers. Storytelling can also target specific audiences to connect with the storyteller and his/her messages.

According to Harris and Barnes (2005), the most frequent themes in leadership stories are:

1. Mistakes and failures. 2. Unexpected opportunities. 3. Risk and reward. 4. Choices and consequences. 5. Lessons learned. 6. Obstacles and challenges. 7. Advice from a mentor. 8. Someone who inspired [the blogger]. (p. 7)

Corporate leaders use their personal experiences as great sources of leadership stories to communicate important messages to their readers. Meanwhile, an appropriate level of self-discourse may help the storyteller engage readers of his/her blog (Harris &

Barnes, 2005). A successful self-disclosure can build trust and encourage openness. Thus, organizations are believed to be benefit from the increased openness and trust engendered by telling the truth in interesting and productive ways.

Corporate Blogs as a Means to Foster Trust

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer report (2006), blogs and bloggers could act as potential corporate credibility indexes as the Internet remains steadily in the third place position (19 %) among media providing trustworthy information/news. When people consider the credibility of information provided about a company and the trustworthiness of the source, “regular employees of a company” are rated at 45 percent credibility; the “CEO of company” garners a 28 percent rating, and “Public Relations executives” are rated at 17 percent. It is noted that “Blogger” (13 %) has become a new index of credibility of information sources regarding a company in the 2006 survey.

Notably, according to 27 percent of people in the United States, employee or CEO blogs are considered to be one of the corporate attributes that build trust. In addition, the practice of a corporate CEO acting as a spokesperson to convey the information about a company has grown in credibility in the past three years in the United States (from 11 % in 2003 to 27 % in 2006).

This 2006 year Trust Barometer report conducted by Edelman public relations firm provided some implications for using corporate blogs as a means to bolster trust in publics. When people are asked about the credibility of information sources about a company, they tend to choose “a person like yourself or your peer” (meaning an average

person) as the most creditable person to communicate information about a company,

reflected in the 68 percent rating in the United States. Also, the majority of people (72 %)

tend to believe multiple sources of information about a company. These survey results,

which incorporate characteristics of blogs, are applicable to the setting of corporate blogs

and are indicative of public opinion regarding such sites. Results suggest that providing a

top executive’s viewpoint as a lens with which to look at corporate policy and products

makes corporate blogging a more credible format than corporate advertisements and

official newsletters.

Principles for Public Relations Blogging

Issues surrounding disclosure and the ethics of blogging are primary concerns for

organizations when they enter into this realm of communication. Balnave et al. (2004)

studied the transforming relationships among organizations, public relations and

journalism and advocated that professionals in the field of public relations and journalism

should revisit the “disclosure ethics” issue (p. 199). They argued that disclosure ethics are

important in the redefined relationship between online news operations and their readers.

As they pointed out, the biggest change associated with the Internet is the push and pull technology model. Lasisca (1997) pointed out that the push technology, which refers to

“the concept of delivering content to Internet consumers rather than expecting them to seek out a Website,” delivers personalized news to readers directly (as cited in Balnaves et al., 2004, p. 199). Weblogs fit this definition of push technology; instead of requiring a search for information, blog feeds such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) “push” the latest content to readers. Due to the participatory communication, everyone can get involved in blogging without editorial examination or undergoing professional training

for responsibility of the content. Therefore, the issue of how to keep the validity of

information to retain trust and credibility in the push technology society is crucial for

public relations practitioners to consider (Balnaves et al., 2004). Similarly, Smudde (2005)

agreed with disclosure ethics and proposed an ethical approach to public relations

blogging. In his opinion, reader trust determines whether a blog is credible or not. In this

regard, he further pointed out that forthrightness, openness, consistency, timeliness,

truthfulness, and candor bolster trust building (Smudde, 2005).

Concerning the disclosure ethics issue, scholars propose several principles for public relations professionals attempting to blog in an ethical way, including: using plain talk, being candid candor, being honest and transparent in communication, remaining independent from sponsored organizations, focusing on long-term return rather than short-term, and being customer and stakeholder –oriented, not organizational-centric

(Culbertson, 2005).

This study employs multiple perspectives in an effort to understand the nature of corporate blogs. In order to understand the application of corporate blog at the organization level, diffusion theory is supplemented as a means to examine people in leadership positions who are writing corporate blogs. Corporate blogging is in the early-adopter phase in terms of innovation-decision period and also fits into Rogers’ theory of exploring patterns and models of diffusion related to this innovative online communications.

Diffusion of Innovations

History of Diffusion Research

The first and oldest diffusion of innovations study was applied to anthropology

(Rogers, 2003). Diffusion research has long been employed extensively in various fields of study, including anthropology, rural sociology, education, public health and medical

sociology, communication, marketing and management, geography, general sociology.

Among those fields of study, rural sociology (20%), marketing and management (16%)

and communication (15%) are the three major fields most frequently applying diffusion

studies. Rogers first identified the concept of diffusion of innovations in 1962. Scholars

have various viewpoints regarding what constitutes diffusion. Diffusion is seen as a

special type of communication that incorporates new ideas. It can also be described as

one kind of social change to alter the structure and function of a social system. Some

people classified diffusion as unplanned and spontaneous with regard to the spread of

new ideas. Rogers (2003) incorporated both planned and spontaneous dissemination of ideas, defining diffusion as “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (p. 5). To further elucidate the process of diffusion of innovations, Rogers broke down the definition into the following four elements: (1) innovation, (2) communication channel,

(3) time, and (4) a social system.

Elements in the Diffusion of Innovations Process

The following section provides explanations of each element in the diffusion process.

1) The Innovation

An innovation is defined as “An idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption” (Rogers, 2003, p. 12). Web-based innovations have been a favorite topic for studying the diffusions process in organizations (Beatty,

Shim & Jones, 2001; Rogers, 2003, Rogers & Allbritton, 1995). Technological innovations are usually being examined in terms of two aspects: hardware and software.

It is noted that technology may be “entirely composed of information “(Rogers, 2003, p.

13) and that information may be a political philosophy, a religious idea, a news event, or

a policy. Owing to low visibility in observation, Rogers (2003) concluded that

information innovations usually have a slower adoption rate compared to technological hardware innovation. Five characteristics of an innovation are (1) relative advantage, (2)

compatibility, (3) complexity, (4) trialability, and (5) observability.

2) Communication Channels

Communication channels are the “means by which messages get from one

individual to another” (p. 18). In diffusion research, mass media and interpersonal

communication are identified as two critical communication channels for creating and

sharing information with one another. Previous research pointed out that interpersonal

channels of communication are more effective in persuading individuals to accept new

ideas than mass media channels. Studies also suggest that individuals depend highly on

homophilous peers’ (individuals who interact are similar in certain attributes) experiences

and are usually affected by previous adopters’ evaluations of an innovation.

3) Time

Time in the diffusion process is related to the period of adoption of innovation

decision. Five conceptualized stages of the diffusion process are (1) knowledge, (2)

persuasion, (3) decision, (4) implementation, and (5) confirmation. At the same time,

Rogers categorized five types of adopters by relative rate of adoption of innovations,

including (1) innovators, (2) early adopters, (3) early majority, (4) late majority, and (5)

laggards.

4) A Social System

Social system in the diffusion process means “a set of interrelated units that are

engaged in joint problem solving to accomplish a common goal” (p. 23). Diffusion study

suggests that the social system plays an important role in facilitating or impeding the

diffusion of innovations. Social norms, opinion leaders, change agents, aide (similar to

change agents but a less than fully professional change agents), and consequences are

influential factors regarding the diffusion of innovations.

Rogers’ early works focused on diffusions on the individual level and concluded that the diffusion of innovations is a linear process, meaning that the decision of adoption relates to whether individuals accept or reject the innovation. However, in his later

research, the innovation-decision period was modified to a normal distribution curve by

the five-stage category.

Typology of Diffusion Research

The diffusion of innovations research is designed to find a general diffusion model.

To investigate various types of innovations, Rogers (2003) identified eight types of

diffusion analysis research:

1. Earliness of knowing about innovations. 2. Rate of adoption of different innovations in a social system. 3. Innovativeness. 4. Opinion leadership. 5. Diffusion network. 6. Rate of adoption in different social systems. 7. Communication channel usage. 8. Consequences of innovation. (pp. 96-97)

Among them, over 58 percent of the research regarding innovations is focused on

the third category, the innovativeness of members of a social system. Analysis units are

members of a social system, which may consist of individuals or organizations, and the

characteristics of members and the system act as independent variables to study. The

research frame of this study is largely borrowed from the third category of innovativeness

of members of a social system in order to investigate shared characteristics of corporate blogs, corporate size, and corporate structure.

Innovations in Organizations

Diffusion research first began by studying innovations spread among individual decision makers. However, the analysis of the adoption unit shifted from individuals to organizations in the 1980s, because researchers found that early studies oversimplified the complexity of organizations. An organization, according to Rogers’ definition, is “a stable system of individuals who work together to achieve common goals through a hierarchy of ranks and a division of labor” (p. 404). Theoretically, cumulative distribution of organizations’ innovations usually follows an S-shaped rate of adoption within one organization as well as among many organizations. Based on the process of innovations within organizations, Rogers established a continuum of innovations and divided innovations adaptors into five categories:

1. Innovators: Innovators are venturesome and play a gatekeeper role in the flow of new ideas into a system. 2. Early Adopters: Early adopters are a more integrated part of the local social system than are innovators. Also, early adopters tend to be the opinion leaders. 3. Early Majority: The early majority adopts new ideas just before the average member of a system. 4. Late Majority: The late majority adopts new ideas after the average member of a system. 5. Laggards: Laggards are the last in a social system to adopt an innovation. (Rogers, 2003, pp. 282-285)

The interest in studying innovations of organizations has been increasing since the

1980s. While business managers have recognized the impacts of the innovation process on their organizations, new communication technologies have further facilitated diffusion

31 studies as well. Most studies of innovations within organizations have been centered on new communication technology, such as the use of email, management information system, and Internet-related innovations. Research found that diffusion via the Internet greatly accelerates the rate of innovations adoption (Singhal & Rogers, 2001, as cited in

Rogers, 2003). In addition, Rogers and Allbritton (1995) indicated that critical mass is a key factor influencing the diffusion of interactive communication technology in organizations. Critical mass is “the point after which further diffusion becomes self-sustaining” (Rogers, 2003, p. 343) and tends to occur at about 10 to 20 percent of the adoption rate. Once critical mass is achieved, the rate of adoption accelerates. Beatty et al.

(2001) developed a model of Website adoption and identified five factors facilitating rate of adoption, including perceived benefits, organizational compatibility, technical compatibility, top management support, and complexity, which is the degree of difficulty associated with understanding an innovation.

Characteristics of Organizational Innovativeness

Several characteristics are associated with organizational innovations. Rogers

(2003) studied the diffusion within organizations and found that size, value, structural characteristics, and leader characteristics of organizations are variables affecting diffusion patterns and adoption rates of organization innovations.

Size

Organizational innovations studies have found a positive correlation between organizational size and the rate of adoption with larger organizations tending to be more innovative.

Structural Characteristics

Organizational structures and configurations also affect innovations. Variables of structural characteristic are developed from three perspectives: individual (leader), internal, and external organizational characteristics. The individual variable in diffusion research refers to attitudes regarding change. The study of Website adoption confirms that organizational supports, including top management interest, organization values and

beliefs, and a favorable attitude contribute significantly to organizational innovativeness

(Beatty et al., 2000). Internal organizational structure variables include centralization,

complexity, formalization, interconnectedness, organizational slack and size. McPhee and

Poole (2000) studied organizational structure patterns and found decentralized, flexible

and participatory organizations positively influence the organizational communication

process. In addition, larger organizational size also leads to greater and broader decision

participation and making. The external organizational structure variable refers to the

openness of systems, or the degree of acceptance of exchange with external

environments.

Role of Champions

A champion, according Rogers’ definition, is a “charismatic individual who throws

his or her weight behind an innovation, thus overcoming any indifference or resistance

that the new idea may cause in an organization “(p. 414). Champions can be influential

people in top executive positions or lower-level individuals who are adept at coordinating

with other people. The role of champions is to initiate the innovation process and

contribute to the acceptance of innovations. Notably, the champion role is sometimes

equated to the role of opinion leaders and both are within a social system. Unlike change

33 agents, which work out of a system as external forces, champions operate with a social system to influence innovation-decision.

Research Questions

Rogers (2003) mentioned that critical mass is an important factor in the adoption of an interactive communication technology, and a critical mass is defined as 10 to 20 percent of entire populations. It is suggested that once the point of critical mass is achieved, the utility of a new interactive communication technology can benefit all adopters. Interactivity is defined by Rogers as “the degree to which participants in a communication process can exchange roles, in, and have control over, their mutual discourse” (p. 343). Mutual disclosure here refers to the “degree to which a given communication act is based on a prior series of communication acts” (p. 343). It can be explained as a cumulative sequence in which previous messages can affect the creation of following messages. Weblog, as one of the evolving online communication forms, features high interactivity and instant feedback mechanism, thus fitting well in this proposition. Similarly, Rice and Webster (2002) claimed that the adoption, the diffusion, and the use of new media have been hard to predict because of the influences of individual, task, contextual, media/system, social, organizational and external factors.

Based on the aforementioned areas, the theoretical framework of new interactive communication applies well to the adoption, use, and diffusion of Weblogs, especially in corporate blogging.

Thus, the purpose of this study is to provide descriptive data of the corporate blogging phenomenon, examine the current state of corporations’ adoption of corporate blogs, and suggest principles for building trust and creditable relationships through blog communications. The concept of critical mass is fundamental to understand how new

technologies and new media are adopted in a social system (Rice & Webster, 2002;

Rogers 2003), and it reveals why some new technologies gain acceptance and why they

are put to use.

Although the total structure of corporate blogging is not yet developed, the small

subset of 131 CEOs’ blogs in this beginning study may provide an initial understanding

of the application of Weblogs in corporate communications. Therefore, this study utilizes

the diffusion theoretical frame to examine the current state of corporate blogging in the

context of 131 CEOs blogs chosen for examination.

RQ1. How do the adoption situations of Weblogs among selected corporations and

industry types affect the adoption behavior?

While the perceived credibility of information conveyed by CEOs/CFOs still falls

behind that of information conveyed by regular company employees, the credibility

percentage for CEO/CFO postings has grown steadily, from 11 percent in 2003 to 27

percent in 2006. Thus, leadership blogs and corporate blogging seem to offer a new

venue for public relations practitioners to design proactive communication messages for

target audiences. Studies suggest that being responsive to feedback and open to dialogue

are imperative factors for organizations communicating with their key public through

blogs (Kelleher & Miller, 2006; Seltzer, 2005). Balnaves et al. (2004) and Smudde (2005)

noted that the rise of Weblogs has reconstructed the organizational-public relations and advocated an ethical and proactive approach for public relations to do blogging. To evaluate the level of responsiveness in two-way communication and narrative features by organizational leaders, the following questions are posed:

RQ2. What are the motivations and common communication attributes of corporate blogs?

RQ3. What narrative features and level of personal disclosure are presented in corporate blogs?

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY

Kerlinger (2000) defines content analysis as “a method of studying and analyzing communication in a systematic, objective, and quantitative manner for the purpose of measuring variables” (Kerlinger, 2000, as cited in Wimmer & Dominick, 2003, p. 141).

Content analysis, which is extensively used in mass media research, is favorably regarded as an ideal instrument to assess communication content, test message characteristics, compare media- portrayed images, and study the effects of media (Wimmer & Dominick,

2003). Wimmer and Dominick (2003) noted that content analysis is a more systematic and objective method of representing data, because the coding and analysis procedures require uniformity. The following are the 10 steps suggested to effectively complete content analysis:

1. Formulate the research question or hypothesis. 2. Define the population in question. 3. Select an appropriate sample from the population. 4. Select and define a unit of analysis. 5. Construct the categories of content to be analyzed. 6. Establish a quantification system. 7. Train coders and conduct a pilot study. 8. Code the content according to established definitions. 9. Analyze the collected data. 10. Draw conclusions and search for indications (p. 145).

Current studies of Weblogs tend to favor the use of quantitative content analysis to identify features of blogs (Seltzer, 2005; Trammell, 2004; Trammell & Kiousis, 2005).

Furthermore, Trammell and Gassers (2004) proposed content analysis as a primary means for understanding the content presented in blogs (as cited in Trammell, 2004). Hence, to

35 36

answer the research questions posed by this study, a standard quantitative content analysis has been applied to the corporate blogs selected for assessment.

The operational definition of a Weblog is ” a frequently updated Web page with

entries arranged in reverse chronological order” (Trammell, 2005, p. 9) while CEO blogs are defined as “Weblogs authored by people who are in a leadership position in various

organizations” (PR Wiki, 2006a, para. 8).

Population

Currently are no official statistics with regard to how many corporations have

entered into the blogosphere while this study has been conducted. The work of collecting

a complete corporate blogs list is still in progress, thus this study gathered samples from

an appropriate collective wiki Website. “Wiki” is software that allows people to freely

edit Web page content in Web browsers. Because corporate blogs are growing daily, it is

impossible for only a few people to generate an inclusive corporate blogs list.

Consequently, several online wiki Websites suggest that the task of compiling a

comprehensive corporate blogs list should be conducted collectively. Due to the lack of

official statistics regarding corporate blogging, this study has adopted personal or

individual lists of corporate blogs as alternative sample sources. Currently, the European

Corporate Blogs (http://www.corporateblogging.info/europe/), the Fortune 500 Business

Blogging Wiki (www.socialtext.net/bizblogs/), and the New PR Wiki

(http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php) are three major Websites offering up-to-date corporate blogging statistics. The European Corporate Blogs site is

maintained by a Swedish Web communications advisor, Fredrik Wackå, and focuses on

corporate blogs in Denmark, Norway, and other European countries (Wackå, 2006b). The

other two Websites present information in online wiki forms. The Fortune 500 Business

Blogging Wiki amasses only Fortune 500 companies’ business blogs, defining business

blogs as “active public blogs [created] by company employees about the company and/or

its products” (Fortune 500 Blogging, 2006, para. 1). The New PR Wiki (PRWiki, 2006b)

site, which was established on May 17, 2004, functions as a collaborative tool for public

relations professionals and those interested in the field to collect Weblogs authored by

top executives in various industries, both in public and private sectors. It also establishes

several categories of blogs lists, including the CEO intranet blogs list, the corporate blogs

list, the product blogs List, and the business podcasts list and biz blogs consultant. As of

January 31, 2006, 226 CEOs appear on the CEO Blogs List (PRWiki, 2006a). Among

these, 131 CEOs who write on corporate blogs work for U.S.-based companies.

Because corporate blogging is still in its infancy and that the complete scope of blogs remains difficult to ascertain (Kelleher & Miller, 2006; Seltzer, 2005), this study used the CEOs Blogs List (See Appendix B), which is collected by New PR Wiki, as the sampling frame for studying the characteristics of discussion topics, level of self-disclosure and update frequency of corporate leaders’ blogs. There are two reasons behind the rationale for selecting samples from New PR Wiki for this study. First, the site provides a broader scope for what constitutes a corporate blog and is also not restricted only to Fortune 500 companies. While Fortune 500 companies are selected as the most representative sample in previous Web communication research, this limited sample could overshadow other small but creative and innovative corporate blogs, which are addressed in this exploratory study. Second, the CEOs blogs list adopted from PR Wiki

(2006a) gathered Weblogs authored by organization leaders serving in positions ranging from president to chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief technology officer,

chief information officer and marketing director. This sample coincides well with the

champion role definition as discussed earlier by Rogers (2003). As outlined in the

literature review, the speed and patterns of diffusion of corporate innovations are related

to organizational structural and the roles that leaders of these corporations play. Hence,

bloggers in leadership positions are suitable subjects to study in an attempt to evaluate the

influence of corporate leaders over the adoption of business blogs by their respective

corporations and also in the identification of characteristics of those CEO’s blogs.

Sample

One requirement of a good blog is its timeliness, which means “regular,

date-stamped entries” (Gill, 2004. p. 1). Therefore, corporate bloggers who have steady

update frequency meet the criteria. Using timeliness as a subset to generate a subsample

might be too narrow to define what a good blog is; however, it might help to observe

whether the “quality” and “quantity” of CEO’s posts is important and provide

implications for future research.

The concept of frequency with regards to blogs refers to how often each week or

each day a blog is updated. Some independent bloggers post more than once a day.

However, many CEOs may not update their blogs with this same high level of frequency.

Thus, one of the aims of this study is to provide an overview of the mean quantity of a

CEO’s blog per month. To do so, this study assesses the number of blog posts over the

past twelve months to derive a “pseudo frequency” from quantity. While this method is not a wholly accurate measure of frequency, it can provide an index to measure the mean number of posts per month.

Wimmer and Dominick (2003) suggested that research designed as a preliminary search for general indications typically does not require a large sample. As the purpose of

39 this initial study is to provide descriptive result of the common features of the 131 CEOs’ blogs and suggest principles to most effectively achieve two-way communications, a stratified sampling is used to select 50 CEOs blogs for further content analysis. Stratified sampling ensures that (1) “representation of relevant variables is ensured, (2) selection is made from a homogeneous group, and (3) sampling error is reduced” (Wimmer &

Dominic, 2003, p. 92).

The selection of the 50 blogs is based on the frequency with which they are updated as assessed on the basis of total posts over the past 12 months. By counting the total number of posts during the period spanning from March 1 2005 to February 28, 2006 and dividing by months, the researcher selected the 50 blogs demonstrating the highest update frequency for further analysis.

After that, 10 posts were chosen from the 50 blog sites based on systematic random sampling to generate analysis units. Systematic sampling methods are used frequently in mass media research because they are as effective as randomized processes and save time in sampling procedure (Wimmer & Dominick, 2003). For this study, the coder picked the

2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th posts in the blogs and chronicles the order accordingly in the time frame. If any of the blogs had been on the Internet over one year, then 10 posts were assigned proportionally in each year in order to reduce sampling errors. For instance, in the case of a blog created on January 1, 2003, the 10 analysis units would come from two posts for each year from 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006.

Unit of Analysis

The analysis unit of this study is the blog. The blog posts assessed were coded according to coder’s observations of the communication features present in the sites, including author’s background and contact information, archive frequency, search

engines, blog feeds and email subscriptions, use of photo/graphics, use of multimedia,

blogrolls, comments, trackbacks, permalinks, and category of blog posts. In addition, the

motivation of corporate bloggers for running their respective blogs was coded as well as

the topics covered, the personal nature of the sites, and the narrative features on corporate

statements in blog content.

Categories Development

This study integrates and modifies categories from multiple previous studies of

Weblogs (Kelleher & Miller, 2006; Seltzer, 2005; Trammell, 2004), most of which

derived categories based on Website characteristics. Seltzer (2005) revised Kent, Taylor and White’s study in 2001 and 2003, establishing 32 items to evaluate the dialogic potential of Weblogs. Trammell (2004) utilized content analysis of a political Website by

Banwart (2002) and Bystrom, Banwart, Robertson and Kaid (2004) to assess the messages presented in celebrity blogs and their impacts on blogs readership. According to Wimmer and Dominick (2003), a codebook and coding sheet are recommended to assure reliability of content analysis. The codebook and coding sheet, which can be found in Appendix C, Appendix D and Appendix E, is the primary instrument used to implement content analysis in this study. The format of the coding sheet is based on studies conducted by Trammell (2004), Seltzer (2005) and Kelleher and Miller (2006).

The coding scheme, including basic information, motivation, communication attributes,

personal nature, corporate narrative features, and writing topics, was derived mainly from

the code sheet of Trammell’s (2004) dissertation with slight modifications and the

elimination of irrelevant categories. Additional categories based on Seltzer (2005) and

Kelleher and Miller (2006) are formulated to evaluate the communication functions of

CEOs’ Weblogs. The following section introduces and provides the operational definition

for coding categories.

Coding Sheet Construction

Two major sections with a total of 68 items constitute the content analysis (see

Appendix D and Appendix E). All items are mutually exclusive and exhaustive in

accordance with principles of category building. The first part of the coding procedure is

primary intended to generate basic information about the 131 corporate blogs with 37

items based on the following four categories: Basic Information, Motivation, and

Communication Attributes. The basic information component refers to common features

of a blog site, including title, description, and URL of CEO’s blog, main URL of

corporation, affiliated organization, name and job title of author, number of total post

(from first post in the blog, from the day the blog began), number of blog posts in the past

12 months, timestamp of the first and last entry in the blog site, whether the author

provides his/her motivation for blogging and the section in which the author states his/her

motivation for running the blog.

The motivation portion is designed to identify the dominant motivation of corporate

bloggers in the creation of their blogs. Papacharissi (2002) provides an operational

definition of motivation based upon the six following categories, including entertainment,

information, social interaction, self-expression, passing time and professional

advancement (as cited in Trammell, 2004). Considering that most corporate blogs serve

corporate goals, this study replaces the passing time category with industry insights. Also,

to present the motivation of blog authors more accurately, the categories of entertainment, social interaction, and professional advancement have been modified. The following definitions discuss the significance of each category:

1. Entertainment: The item is written because it incorporates an element of self

interest.

2. Information: Item is written to provide information that may be helpful to

others.

3. Social interaction: Item is written as a way to communicate with

organizational key publics or as a way to reach out to others reading the item.

4. Self-expression: Item is written to tell others about oneself, provide personal

information, and communicate feelings or thoughts.

5. Professional advancement: Item is seemingly written to self-promote the

author and affiliated organization in career.

6. Industry insights: Items written on specific area and topics are related to the

industry in which the author of the blog works.

The basic communication section refers to communication functions and is broken

down into 18 items. Coding items include background information about the authors,

archive indexes, archive frequency, search engines, email subscription services,

RSS/XML subscription services, use of photos/graphics, use of multimedia, presence of

blogrolls, including blogrolls connecting to affiliated organization, recommended books

lists, comment feedback mechanism, permission of anonymous comment, trackback

feedback mechanism, permalink mechanism, and indications of whether the writing topic

is categorized or not.

The second part of the coding procedure uses the stratified sample, which is generated from the top 50 most frequently updated blogs, to further analyze blog contents

and characteristics, including Personal Nature, Corporate Narrative Features and Writing

Topics sections based on thirteen coding items.

The personal nature section refers to three items meant to evaluate how much information blog authors reveal to their readers. A Likert scale of 1 – 5 is employed to evaluate the degree of personal disclosure. The Likert technique is suitable for accessing attitude statements. Blog posts are evaluated to express their agreement level on a scale of 1 to 5, with an indication of 5 meaning “very personal” and a rating of 1 meaning “not at all”. The following Likert scale is derived from Trammell’s (2004) study with some

modifications. Points on the scale are described as follows:

1 = Not at all: Absolutely no personal information is revealed. The format is

business-like, e.g., “Check out this article.”

2 = A Little Personal: Mostly impersonal. These sites may have some very benign views, thoughts, or ideas expressed; not controversial or very revealing, e.g., “I don’t like my hair cut.”

3 = Acquaintance Personal: Somewhat personal comments. It covers topics one might tell a friend or an acquaintance (however, NOT a best friend), e.g., “Today is my

wedding anniversary” or “My son bought a PS2.”

4 = Old friend-type personal: Contains very personal comments that are

surprising to someone who does not know that person. This includes basic details about

health conditions, intimate feelings (about successes/failures), experiences, etc., e.g., “I

just had a health examination” or “ I learned a lesson from the 2002’s investment

failure……”

5 = Very Personal: These sites provide too much information and may not be

relevant to the main motivation for blogging. Comments covered are often shockingly

intimate, e.g., “I have had a love affair with …….”

The narrative features of corporate blog contents are designed to assess whether

characteristics of human voice in blog communication are presented or not. The first five

coding items analyze if corporate bloggers communicate with readers in a conversational

human voice, including inviting dialogue, conversation style, speaking tone, and

admitting mistakes. Item six through item nine investigate topics discussed and attitudes

toward competitors. Items 10 and 11 examine the presence of expert authority by Weblog

authors and third-parties. Items 12 and 13 ask if corporate blog authors state his/her affiliated organization’s mission and future vision.

The writing topic component refers to the topics or categories established by blog authors. This section categorized writing topics in CEOs’ blog into 15 subjects. Writing topics consist of the corporate blog author’s discussion of thoughts while providing knowledge and predicting trends in several sectors, including blogging, working industry,

Internet technology, current affairs and mass media. Others topics are related to aspects

of entrepreneurships, the author’s working organization, including publicity items and

professional announcements, new products, new corporate initiatives, lawsuits or

controversial issues of affiliated organizations, and news coverage announcement

involving the CEO himself/herself and its affiliated organizations. The remainders of the

topics fall into personal and miscellaneous categories.

Time Period

The time frame used for coding was the two-month span from January 1, 2006 to

February 28, 2006. In accordance with this time frame, blog posts were also selected for a

year other than 2006; the time frame was still two months, from January 1 to February 28

in other years.

Coding Procedure and Inter-Coder Reliability

The coding procedure is twofold. First, each of the 131 CEO blog sites is coded

based on its background information, author’s motivations for running his/her blog, and

the site’s communication attributes and categorized using 37 coding items. This

procedure yielded a descriptive result of the 131 CEOs blogs and a stratified sample of

the top 50 most often updated blog sites among the CEOs blogs list.

The second stage of the coding procedure involves analyzing 10 posts from each

blog selected by systematic random sampling in order to understand the self-disclosure

level of corporate blog authors through the content messages present on their sites. 10

posts of the 50 stratified samples are drawn for further analysis of the content of blog

posts.

The author of this study along with the other graduate student served as coders to

analyze the CEOs’ blogs sites in March 2006. To obtain a valid result based on content

analysis, Holsti’s formula (1969) is employed to check the inter-coder reliability:

2M Reliability = N1+ N2

M: the number of coding decisions on two coders’ agreement

N1: the total number of coding decisions by the first coder

N2: the total number of coding decisions by the second coder

The inter-coder reliability coefficient was calculated to be 88 percent, which confirms a relatively high level of internal validity for the research instrument.

Data Analysis

This study utilizes the Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) 13.0 version for Windows. SPSS is well regarded in terms of statistical data processing capabilities. In addition, this study implements descriptive statistics, frequency, chi-square (crosstab), and analysis of variances.

CHAPTER 4 RESULTS

This study employed a content analysis of corporate blogs to investigate the dialogic function, communication attributes, and narrative features of corporate leaders’ blogs. The results have been broken down into three areas, including the diffusion situation of sampled corporate blogs, corporate blog communication attributes, and content analysis of narrative features derived from examining the use of human voice in blog communication.

Sample

Of the 131 CEO blogs originally assessed, 125 provided valid cases and were utilized for this study. Six of the sites provided invalid observations, included three missing Web pages, one access-permission denied site, one non-U.S. based company, and one multi-authorship blog, which means the author is not the only host of that blog.

Sample information from corporate blogs is summarized in Table 4-1. Utilizing the 2002

North American Industry Code System (NAICS), 10 industry categories are identified in the sampled corporations. This coding system incorporates the use of six digits with the first two digits referring to the general category. For example, public relations agencies are distinguished with the number 5418 and marketing services with 5416, but these two services are in the same category, Professional service. Hence, “54” is the two-digit number that corresponds with the general definition of professional service. This study used the two – digit code of NAICS to categorize industry. The following section provides a brief definition of each category:

47 48

NAICS Categories

Manufacturing (31-33): The Manufacturing sector is comprised of establishments engaged in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products.

Information (51): The Information sector includes establishments engaged in the following processes: (a) producing and distributing information and cultural products, (b) providing the means to transmit or distribute these products as well as data or communications, and (c) processing data, e.g., news publishers, software publishers, Web search portals, and data processing service.

Finance and Insurance (52): The Finance and Insurance sector is comprised of establishments primarily engaged in financial transactions (transactions involving the creation, liquidation, or change in ownership of financial assets) and/or in facilitating financial transactions, e.g., investment advice, trust, fiduciary, and custody activities and venture capital.

Real Estate and Rental and Leasing (53): The Real Estate and Rental and

Leasing sector includes establishments primarily engaged in renting, leasing, or otherwise allowing the use of tangible or intangible assets as well as establishments providing related services. The major portion of this sector comprises establishments that rent, lease, or otherwise allow the use of their own assets by others. The assets may be tangible, as is the case of real estate and equipment, or intangible, such is the case with patents and trademarks.

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services (54): The Professional,

Scientific, and Technical Services sector is made up of establishments that specialize in performing professional, scientific, and technical activities for others. Activities

49 performed include legal advice and representation; accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll services; architectural, engineering, and specialized design services; computer services; consulting services; research services; advertising services; photographic services; translation and interpretation services; veterinary services; and other professional, scientific, and technical services.

Health Care and Social Assistance (62): The Health Care and Social Assistance sector consists of establishments providing health care and social assistance for individuals. The sector includes both health care and social assistance because it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the boundaries of these two activities.

Accommodation and Food Services (72): The Accommodation and Food

Services sector is comprised of establishments providing customers with lodging and/or preparing meals, snacks, and beverages for immediate consumption. The sector includes both accommodation and food service establishments because the two activities are often combined at the same establishment.

Other Services (except Public Administration) (81): This sector consists of establishments engaged in providing services not specifically provided for elsewhere in the classification system. Establishments in this sector are primarily engaged in activities, such as equipment and machinery repair, promoting or administering religious activities, grantmaking, advocacy, and providing drycleaning and laundry services, personal care services, death care services, pet care services, photofinishing services, temporary parking services, and dating services.

Public Administration (92): The Public Administration sector consists of establishments of federal, state, and local government agencies that administer, oversee,

and manage public programs and have executive, legislative, or judicial authority over

other institutions within a given area.

Uncategorized: Organizations not specified in NAICS code.

Others: category set aside for corporations that do not provide enough information

for coders to categorize.

Table 4-1, The Breakdown of Sample Set by NAICS Categories, provides the

distribution of numbers and percentages each NAICS category as compared to the entire

study sample (N = 125). The majority of respondents fall into the Information category

and Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services category, accounting for 42.4 percent

and 40.4 percent respectively, followed by Finance and Insurance (4.8 %), Health Care

and Social Assistance (2.4 %) and uncategorized organizations (2.4 %). Less than 10

percent of the sample sites are related to the industries of Manufacturing, Real Estate and

Rental and Leasing, Accommodation and Food Services, Other Services, and Public

Administration.

Table 4-1. The Breakdown of Sample Set by NAICS Categories Percentage (%) Number of sites of total sample NAICS category Manufacturing 3 2.4 Information 53 42.4 Finance and Insurance 6 4.8 Real Estate and Rental and Leasing 1 0.8 Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services 51 40.4 Health Care and Social Assistance 3 2.4 Accommodation and Food Services 2 1.6 Other Services (except Public Administration) 2 1.6 Public Administration 1 0.8 Uncategorized 3 2.4 Total 125 100

First Timestamp, Latest Timestamp and Update Frequency

Blogs (N = 118) have kept their first timestamp posts accessible. The first

timestamp is defined as the earliest post that the coder could find on the blog site’s

archive. According to Table 4-2, The Occurrence of Corporate Blogs, nearly 80 percent

of samples were created between 2004 and 2005. The growth of blog surged 50 percent

in 2005 and stands as 44.9 percent of the entire population. Figure 4-1 showed the growth

of corporate blogs in histograms.

Table 4-2. The Occurrence of Corporate Blogs Number Percentage (%) of of sites total sample Timestamp of First Entry Before 01/01/2001 1 0.8 01/01/2001~12/31/2001 4 3.4 01/01/2002~12/31/2002 9 7.6 01/01/2003~12/31/2003 15 12.7 01/01/2004~12/31/2004 36 30 01/01/2005~12/31/2005 53 44.9 Total 118 100

100

25 Counts of Corporate Blogs Counts of Corporate Blogs

0 11/27/1997 01/27/2001 03/30/2004 Timeframe

Figure 4-1 Growth of Corporate Blogs

The study uses the latest timestamp (as of February 28, 2006) to evaluate whether

or not the blog site is active. Table 4-3, The Time Period of Latest Blog Entry, provides a

summary of the last update timestamp for the blogs assessed. In the vast majority of

cases, blogs have been kept active in the past three months (89.4 %), and only six percent

of samples have not been updated in the past year. However, the relation is not significant

between the lifetime of blogs and their update frequency.

Table 4-3. The Time Period of Latest Blog Entry Number Percentage (%) of sites of total sample Timestamp of Latest Entry 01/01/2003~12/31/2003 1 0.8 01/01/2004~12/31/2004 1 0.8 01/01/2005~06/30/2005 5 4 07/01/2005~11/30/2005 6 5 12/01/2005~12/31/2005 7 6 01/01/2006~01/31/2006 10 9 02/01/2006~02/28/2006 88 74.4 Total 118 100

Research Question One

How do the adoption situations of Weblogs among selected corporations and

industry types affect adoption behaviors?

Adopter Categories

Blog sites are classified into five categories based on the timeframe in which the

corporate blog was created. This study incorporates Rogers’ recommended percentages to

categorize cases into five adopter categories. Based on Roger’s definition, the innovator

is the first 2.5 percent of whole adopters, following by early adopters (13.5%), early

majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%). Table 4-4, Adopter Categories,

displays the five types of adopters and provides a frequency analysis of the occurrence of

53 corporate blog sites. Five time points were identified by the cumulative percentage. Blogs created before June 2000 are innovators in terms of whole adopters (3 blogs, 2.7%). The early adopters (21 blogs, 15%) occurred before June 2003. Major adopters, including early majority (41 blogs, 37.3%) and late majority (30 blogs, 25.4%) occurred within the two-year period spanning from July 2003 to June 2005. Blogs created after June 2005 are categorized as laggards, consisting of 23 blogs or 19.5 percent of the entire sample.

Table 4-4 Adopter Categories Roger’s Timeframe of Occurrence of Cumulative Recommend Category the First Entry on the blog Frequency Percent Percent ed Percent Innovators 01/01/1997~06/30/1997 1 0.8% 0.8% 01/01/2000~06/30/2000 2 1.7% 2.5% 2.5% 07/01/2001~12/31/2001 2 1.7% 4.2% Early Adopters 01/01/2002~06/30/2002 6 5.1% 9.3% 07/01/2002~12/31/2002 2 1.7% 11.0% 01/01/2003~06/30/2003 11 9.3% 20.3% 16% 07/01/2003~12/31/2003 8 4.3% 24.6% Early Majority 01/01/2004~06/30/2004 14 11.8% 36.4% 07/01/2004~12/31/2004 22 18.7% 55.1% 50% Late Majority 01/01/2005~06/30/2005 30 25.4% 80.5% 84% Laggards 07/01/2005~12/31/2005 23 19.5% 100% 100% Total 118 100.0 100.0

Industry Categories of Adopters

Diffusion theory states that innovation happens among members of a social system.

Despite differences, all the industry categories can be viewed as social members of the same social systems (society). Under this circumstance, this study aims to further investigate whether organization structure has an influence over innovation decision periods by breaking industry categories into five-stage adopters (N = 118). Overall, organization industries evidently have influence in the adoption decision of blogs.

Innovators who start corporate blogging all fall under the category of Information industry. In the early adopter’s stage, Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

54 enter the blogosphere. Finance and Insurance industry becomes the early majority of adoption in corporate blogs. However, acceptance of corporate blogging by diversified industries occurs in the late majority stage (Table 4-5). Late majority and laggards account for the right hand side in terms of the normal curve. Public Service and Health

Care and Social Assistance are two new industry categories that make up the late majority as well as Accommodation and Food Services and Real Estate and Rental and

Leasing make up the laggards. Notably, among the late majority and laggards, corporate blogs adopters from the Information category and Professional, Scientific, and Technical

Services industries seems to reach the apex and their adoption numbers goes down.

Table 4-5. Industry Categories by Adopters

Innovators Early Early Late Laggards adopters majority majority Industry Manufacturing 0 0 0 2 1 Information 2 11 24 7 6 Finance and Insurance 0 0 2 2 1 Real Estate and Rental and 0 0 0 0 1 Leasing Professional, Scientific, and 0 10 12 15 10 Technical Services Health Care and Social 0 0 0 1 1 Assistance Accommodation and Food 0 0 0 0 2 Services Other Services (except 0 0 0 2 0 Public Administration) Public Administration 0 0 0 1 0 Uncategorized 1* 0 1 0 1 Others 0 0 2** 0 0 Total = 118 ∗ Patrick’s is the former Vice President of International Technology at IBM. ∗∗ Two of the corporate blogs authors’ affiliated organization Websites were missing so the coder could not accurately determine what NAICS category they fell into

Research Question Two

What are the motivations and common communication attributes of corporate blogs?

Position in the Workplace of Corporate Blogs Authors

First, two thirds of corporate blog sites are independent from their affiliated organizations (N = 83, 66.4%) whereas one third of blogs are under affiliated organizations’ URLs (N = 42, 33.6%). Roughly half of the corporate blog authors are the organization’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) (52%). Much of the remaining percentage is distributed evenly between corporate Founder (9.6%), president (8.8%), vice president

(8%), others (7.2%), chief technology officer (6.4%), director (5.6%), chief operational officer (1.6%) and chief information officer (0.8%). Table 4-6, The Position in the

Workplace of Corporate Blogs Authors, describes the corporate blog author’s position.

Table 4-6 The Position in the Workplace of Corporate Blogs Authors

Number of sites Percentage (%) Position developed Of total sample Others 9 7.2 Founder 12 9.6 CEO 65 52.0 CIO 1 .8 COO 2 1.6 CTO 8 6.4 President 11 8.8 Vice President 10 8.0 Director 7 5.6 Total 125 100.0

Motivation

Over half of corporate blog authors cite their reasoning for running their blogs somewhere on the site (N = 87, 66.4%). 40 sites provided descriptions of the corporate blog (32%) and included an explanation by the author in the first entry that explains the motivations for and expectations of the blog (N = 25, 20%), followed by author’s

56 personal background (N = 18, 14.4%) and other places, such as “about this blog” (N = 4,

3.2%). As referenced in Table 4-7, Motivation for Corporate Blogging, the most dominant motivation is to provide useful information to blog readers and share professional experiences regarding the industry in which author works. Information

(34.5%) and Industry Insight (31%) are more dominant forms of motivation than the other four categories, and social interaction and self-expression both represent 12.7 percent of the total, while 6.8 percent of authors perceive blogging as chiefly fulfilling his/her interests. Professional advancement was the motivation referenced least by blog creators, accounting for only 2.3 percent. Table 4-7 Motivations for Corporate Blogging Number Percentage (%) of of sites total sample Motivation Entertainment 11 8.8 Information 80 6.4 Social interaction 52 41.6 Self-expression 52 41.6 Professional advancement 44 35.2 Industry Insight 68 54.4 Dominant Motivation Entertainment 6 6.8 Information 30 34.5 Social interaction 11 12.7 Self-expression 11 12.7 Professional advancement 2 2.3 Industry Insight 27 31 Total 87 100

Communication Attributes

Overall, corporate blogs (N = 125) offer all communication attribute items. Except for the use of trackbacks (47.2%), the use of multimedia (22.4%), email subscriptions

(24%) and author’s online status (12.8%), other communication attributes all coded over

50 percent. Six communication function indices are distinct with a relatively high respondent rate (over 70%), including offering author’s background information,

providing subscription blog feeds, recommending books, using photos/graphics in blog

content, offering blogrolls, and enabling the comment feedback mechanism. Most

corporate blogs use monthly archives; however, there are still eight percent of blogs that

do not archive blog posts. For the feedback mechanism index, less than half of corporate

blogs allowing for anonymous comments (41%) in Weblogs turn on the comment

function. Among Weblogs offering blogrolls, 65 percent of them provide links connected

to blog authors’ affiliated organizations. The descriptive results of communication

functions are presented in Table 4-8, Communication Attributes of Corporate Blogs.

Table 4-8 Communication Attributes of Corporate Blogs Yes No Category and option Frequency Percentage (%) Frequency Percentage (%) Personal Information Background Information 104 83.2 21 16.8 E-mail address 72 57.6 53 42.4 Online Status (Yahoo! AIM) 16 12.8 109 87.2 Ease of Interface Archive 115 92 10 8 Daily Weekly Monthly Archive Frequency 1(1%) 1(1%) 113(98%) Search Engine 76 60.8 49 39.2 Subscription via email 30 24 95 76 Subscription via blog feeds 109 87.2 16 12.8 Recommended books 94 75.2 31 24.8 Permalinks 63 50.4 62 49.6 Categorize articles by topics 64 50.4 61 48.8 Use of Media Photos/Graphics 89 71.2 36 28.8 Multimedia 28 22.4 97 77.6 Blogrolls Blogrolls 97 77.6 28 22.4 Blogrolls connect to YES NO affiliated organizations 63 (65%) 34(35%)

Table 4-8. Continued… Yes No Category and option Frequency Percentage (%) Frequency Percentage (%) Feedback Mechanism Comments 108 86.4 17 13.6 YES NO Anonymous allowed 45(41%) 80(59%) Trackbacks 59 47.2 66 52.8 N=125

Update Frequency

To assess update frequency, posts of corporate Weblogs in the past 12 months were

calculated to derive a “pseudo frequency” from quantity. To measure the frequency of

postings on corporate blogs less than one year old, the total posts were divided by the

number of months since the sites had been created. Valid cases for investigating

corporate Weblogs update frequency was yielded (N = 114∗, M = 9.17, SD = 15.18) after

taking out the invalid samples, including missing Website pages and those without

archives. The highest monthly update frequency found was on Jeff Jarvis’s site with 124

posts followed by Jeff Pulver’s site with 79.4 and 52.5 posts by Bred Feld. Jeff Jarvis just

left the CEO position of Advance.net and is currently a free lancer. Considering that Jeff

Jarvis’ blog site demonstrates an unusually high entry frequency with 992 posts being

made in seven months, the author decided not to use this particular sample for further

content analysis in an effort to maintain a more homogeneous sample in terms of

bloggers’ working positions and entry frequency. So the next 50 corporate blogs (M =

14.71, SD = 13.31, Minimum = 5.75, Maximum = 79.4) demonstrating the highest update

frequency, ranked from 2nd to 51st, were selected to answer Research Question Three.

∗ 115 corporate blogs have archive functions; however, one corporate blog’s archive showed in HMXL format. Thus the sample for update frequency analysis is 114.

Correlation Findings

Correlation analysis was generated through running Pearson correlation test.

Overall, there is no highly significant correlation in this study. Cases are either in low correlation (p = .1~.3) or negative correlation. The study also found no significant difference in observation between dependent URL and independent URL subgroups on performance of communication attributes categories. URL of corporate blogs were negatively correlated with corporate blogs’ providing of author’s background information

(r = -.179, p < 0.05) and email address (r = -.281, p <0.05).

Research Question Three

What narrative features and levels of personal disclosure are represented in corporate blog posts?

To answer this question, a stratified sample was initially used for content analysis.

According to the update frequency, 50 corporate blogs were selected for a pool to generate analysis units. 10 posts were drawn out of each blog by systematic random sampling method and yielded a total of 499 posts as analysis units. Following this process, the 31 items under personal nature, corporate narrative features, and writing topics constructs were analyzed by using a qualitative content analysis to search for characteristics of corporate blog communication and to determine the topics most discussed in these blogs.

Personal Nature

For personal nature indexes, three items were constructed to assess the level of information blog authors reveal to their readers. Table 4-9, Personal Nature, illustrates the outcome of the personal nature construct. The study first examined the level of personal disclosure on corporate blogs by using a Likert scale with ratings from 1 (Not at

60 all) to 5 (Very Personal) to measure the perceived speaking tone of the corporate blog author for each site. Overall, this study revealed that the mean score for personal disclosure in blog posts is 2.34 (range = 0-5, SD = 0.943). 40 percent of the sample sites

(N = 499) were coded as displaying speech at the Acquaintance Personal level, followed by communication determined to be A Little Personal (27.9%) and Not at all (23.4%).

Less than 10 percent of blog posts are presented in an intimate form for blog communication, revealing very personal information. Results also show that the majority of blog posts address their blog readers directly (69.3%) and blogs readers are identified as groups of readers in 94.1% of blogs assessed.

Table 4-9. Personal Nature

Frequency Percent (%) of total sample Personal Disclosure Level Not at all 117 23.4 A little personal 139 27.9 Acquaintance personal 201 40.3 Old-friend-type personal 39 7.8 Very personal 3 .6 Directly Address Readers YES 153 30.7 NO 346 69.3 Number of Readers Single 29 5.8 Group of readers 363 72.7 Both 107 21.4 Total 499 100.0

Corporate Narrative Features

The corporate narrative features of the sites were evaluated based on the presence or absence of use of human voice, attitudes toward competitors, use of expert/authority, and statement of organization’s future and missions. As shown in Table 4-10, Corporate

Narrative Features, the presence of human voice is more distinct in corporate blogs than are the other three categories: attitudes of competitors, use of expert/authority, and

61 corporate statement. The presence of human voice is determined through five indexes, which were derived from Kelleher and Miller’s (2006) study. The sample demonstrating corporate leader use of conversational-style blog communication is relatively high percentage (73.5%) with speaking tones that are optimistic (55.5%) and trying to be interesting (46.5%). Results of Invite people to conversation and Would admit a mistake are inconsistent with the other three indexes. Only 14.2 percent of corporate blogs displayed intent to invite blog readers to join the dialogue, and 6.2 percent admitted mistakes on behalf of corporate leaders.

In terms of the attitudes toward competitors section, corporate blogs seldom discuss their competitors (16.8%). If references are made to competitors, corporate blogs tend to demonstrate more positive attitudes toward competitors (11.2%) rather than critical perspectives (6.2%). Also, only 16.4 percent of corporate blogs offer hyperlinks to competitors’ Websites. Corporate blogs exhibit insignificant use of expert or authority.

However, corporate bloggers positioning themselves as expert authorities and those who incorporate third-party expert authorities are present in similar percentage rates (25.3% and 21.8% respectively). Finally, two indexes are used to evaluate whether corporate blogs are serving their affiliated organizations. The results in Table 4-9 indicate that corporate statements are not readily apparent in corporate blogs with only 18.6 percent and 12.8 percent of sites in total displaying such statements.

Table 4-10. Corporate Narrative Features

YES No Category and option Frequency Percentage Frequency Percentage Use of Human Voice Invites people to conversation 71 14.2 428 85.8 Uses conversational-style 367 73.5 132 26.5 communication Tries to be interesting in communication 232 46.5 267 53.5 Uses a positive, optimistic tone. 277 55.5 222 44.5 Admits to mistakes 31 6.2 468 93.8 Attitudes toward Competitors Does the person discuss another 85 16.8 414 83.2 competitor? Is the person supportive of another 56 11.2 428 88.8 competitor? Is the person critical of another competitor? 31 6.2 443 93.8 Does the site provide links to 82 16.4 417 83.6 competitors? Use of Expert/Authority Blogger positioning her/himself as an 126 25.3 373 74.7 expert authority Use of expert authorities to shore up 109 21.8 390 78.2 argument Corporate Statement Emphasizing hope for the future 93 18.6 406 81.4 Statement of philosophy or mission 64 12.8 435 87.2 statement of blog author Total 499

Topics Discussed on Corporate Blogs

Finally, writing topics are items that address the issues of corporate blogs are

interested in sharing with their blog readers. Industry news and insights are the most

discussed topics on corporate blogs, reference in 54.8 percent of the cases analyzed.

Feeling, thought, knowledge, and trends about new Internet technology (30.3%),

blogging (27.7%), author’s working organizations and colleagues (24.9%), mass media

(24.7%), entrepreneurship (23.2%) and personal (23.2%) are also frequently mentioned

topics on corporate blogs. Other minor topics of discussion include publicity-type

items/professional announcements (9%), new products/services (9%), new corporate

initiatives or practices (7.7%), lawsuits and controversies (3.2%), news coverage of the

CEO (5.3%), and announcing an appearance/event of his/her affiliated organization

(7.5%). Notably, writing topics related to corporation’s operation tend to be absent,

especially in terms of negative news, such as law suits. Also, corporate-related writing

topics presented to promote products, new initiatives, and organization events are not

very prevalent, appearing in less than 10 percent of entire sample. Table 4-11, Writing

Topics of Corporate Blogs, provided the descriptive result of topics most discussed by

corporate blog authors.

Table 4-11. Writing Topics of Corporate Blogs

YES No Writing Topics Frequency Percentage Frequency Percentage Feelings, thoughts, knowledge, and trends about 130 27.7 339 76.3 blogging Feelings, thoughts, knowledge, and trends about 257 54.8 212 45.2 his/her working industry Feelings, thoughts, knowledge, and trends about Internet technology (wiki, podcasts, VoIP, Web 142 30.3 327 69.7 2.0 , Skype etc) Feelings, thoughts, knowledge, and trends about 105 22.4 364 77.6 current affairs(politics, social events, etc) Feelings, thoughts, knowledge, and trends about 116 24.7 353 75.3 mass media Entrepreneurship (leadership, business 109 23.2 360 76.8 management, etc.) Personal∗ 109 23.2 360 76.8 His/Her workplace, including organization and 117 24.9 352 75.1 colleagues Publicity-type items/professional 42 9 427 91 announcements New products/services 42 9 427 91 New corporate initiatives or practices 36 7.7 433 92.3 Lawsuits or controversial issues of affiliated 15 3.2 454 96.8 organizations News coverage of the CEO himself/herself 25 5.3 444 94.7 Announcing an appearance/event with which 35 7.5 434 92.5 his/her affiliated organization is involved Miscellaneous 66 19.8 403 80.8 Total 499

∗ Personal category is broadly defined as personal feelings, memory, interests, family and friends.

Correlation Findings

Correlation analysis was further to conducted to explore the relationship among narrative features indexes and writing topics. Correlations were found significant between use of human voices constructs and several writing topic indexes. As shown in

Table 4-12, writing topics about entrepreneurships, workplaces and colleagues have positive correlation with invitation for conversation, use of conversational-style communication, being interesting in communication and speaking in optimistic tone.

Table 4-12 Correlations Between Writing Topics and Use of Human Voices Use conversational Tries to be Invites people -style interesting in Use a positive, to communicatio communicatio optimistic conversation n n tone Entrepreneurships Pearson .088* .089* .105* .126** Correlation Sig. (2-tailed) .050 .048 .019 .005 N 499 499 499 499 His/Her Pearson .102* -.008 .040. .134** workplace, Correlation including Sig. (2-tailed) .023 .864 .373 .003 organization and N 499 499 499 499 colleagues * Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION

This study aims to provide a descriptive analysis of the current state of corporate

Weblogs and to address three research questions. The first question asks, “How do the adoption situations of Weblogs among selected corporations and industry types affect the adoption behavior? In doing so, the blogs in the study sample (N = 118) were categorized into five types of adaptors according to the first entry found on each of the blogs sites and were also assigned NAICS codes based on their industry. This research provides empirical results that examine the relationship between the organization industry and adoption behavior of Weblogs. Previous diffusion studies largely focused on corporations’ adoption in email, management information systems, and corporate

Websites. Weblogs, as a new genre on the Internet, are rarely discussed, especially for corporate purposes. This study provides an initial understanding of the adoption of blogs among corporations under the theoretical framework of the diffusion theory. While the current sample cannot fully reflect the actual state of corporate blogs, the study’s results that there is room for future researchers to further analyze the adoption decisions made by corporations.

The second question this study addresses is “What are the motivations and common communication attributes of corporate blogs?” To answer this question, the corporate blog sample (N = 125) was coded through 37 items of basic information, motivations, and communication attributes constructs. By looking at the motivations of each site’s author, this study revealed the objectives that corporate blogs hope to serve. In addition,

65 66 this study explored the potential of Weblogs as a two-way communication tool between corporations and key publics by looking at Weblogs’ communication attributes.

The third question posed is “What narrative features and level of personal disclosure are presented in corporate blogs?” A content analysis was employed in this phase to understand the narrative features and discussed topics on corporate blogs. In doing so, a stratified sample was produced by drawing 10 posts from 50 blogs that demonstrate high frequency in monthly postings. Blog posts (N = 499) were analyzed by looking at the areas of personal nature, narrative features, and writing topics, revealing the topics most discussed by corporate leaders on their blogs. Additionally, the speaking tone of corporate blogs was examined to assess level of interaction in corporate blogging as well as the willingness of authors to engage in open dialogues with audiences.

This study’s results provide preliminary evidence for future research regarding this developing form of online communication used in the context of business settings. In addition, this study allows for greater understanding of the content presented in corporate blogs and supports the claims that human voice from corporate top management is presented in blogs. This study could inform the work of scholars interested in examining corporate adoption behavior and motivations of Weblogs as well as aid in understanding corporate missions in the use of Weblogs. As the diffusion of Weblogs continues to grow more prevalent, indexes for evaluating corporate blogs will be further expand in the future and become more measurable.

This chapter will discuss the overall findings in the diffusion process, assess the communication attributes and content of blogs, and provide specific implications for online public relations and suggestions for future research.

Corporate Adoption Behavior on Blogs

Adopter Category

The data gathered in this study simulates the recommended adoption curve

(expressed in percentages) introduced by Rogers and categorizes corporate blog authors into five types of adopters. Six-month intervals serve as the unit of measurement to construct the classification scheme for adopters. Due to a limited time of emergence of corporate blogs, the percentages of late majority and laggard bloggers are not as precise as recommended percentages (25.4% and 19.5% respectively). However, the use of years as the basis to measure the innovation-decision period provided a reasonable frame for this study. The study suggested that early users of corporate blogs work mainly in the information and professional industries. For instance, business consultants, marketing and public relations agencies, software publishers, and media publishers all fall into these two

NAICS categories.

Roger (2003) claimed that innovation in organizations is related to size, structure, and the role organization leaders play and that top management’s support in the adoption process facilitates the diffusion of the innovation. This study adopted corporate leader’s blogs as a criterion to simulate one of Roger’s propositions. Over 50 percent of blog authors are in CEO positions, and the other half is distributed over other top executive positions. One possible reason that CEOs tend to be the primary authors of corporate blogs may be related to their job duty, which entails responsibility for their respective organizations’ operations and strategic plans. This finding suggests that CEOs tend to use blogs as a strategic communication avenue to convey and exchange opinions with key publics concerning their organizations’ bottom lines and mission statements.

Furthermore, there is no difference in blog update frequency across the five types of

68 adopters. Corporate blogs showed a highly active level of blogging entry in this study with nearly 90 percent of Weblogs displaying posts in the past three months and 74.4 percent demonstrating the latest timestamps of blog entries as of February 2006. This result suggests that corporate authors regularly update their blogs, which is a characteristic of Weblogs that makes them more up-to-date and relevant to current affairs than traditional corporate Websites.

Diffusion of Corporate Blog

Diffusion of Weblogs among corporations has two distinct features: length of adoption rate increases and types of industry spread out as time goes by. As Rogers

(2003) pointed out, the average of innovation - decision period (the length of time required for an individual or organization to adopt an innovation) is different for each category of adopter. In other words, earlier adopters usually have a shorter innovation-decision period than do later adopters. Earlier users need less time than late users in innovation adoption. Furthermore, diffusion through the Internet greatly accelerates an innovation’s rate of adoption (Rogers, 2003). The findings of this study support this proposition. The length of innovation decision period by corporate blog adopters is shown in Figure 5-1. Evidently, innovators demonstrate shorter decision periods than laggards in adopting corporate blogs, and the intervals of time length between adopters categories are drastically shortened, especially in the late majority and laggards.

Innovators 3.5

Early Adopters 6.5

Early Majority 8

Late Majority 9

Laggards 9.5

0246810 Length of Adoption of Corporate Blog (years)

Figure 5-1. Innovation Decision Periods of Corporate Blogs

Another initial finding of this study is that organization industry has become more diversified in the later adopter stage. In addition to information and professional industries, non-information industries such as manufacturing, health care, and public administration have started their organizational Weblogs. Service industries also entered the blogosphere in an attempt to find an alternative venue for communication. For example, McDonald’s launched a new blog in January 2006 to share the corporation’s progress in the area of corporate social responsibility. Although the sample was not sufficiently large enough to represent the distribution of industry types across adopter categories, the study implied that a wider diffusion across different industries occurs among future adopters.

Corporate Blog Content

As discussed, the second purpose of this study was to attempt to understand the motivations of blog authors as well as assess the narrative features and topics discussed in corporate blogs. The corporate blog content in this study refers to the Weblogs communication function and content of blog posts, not including content appearing in comments and trackbacks. The content analysis of blog posts related to industry news reported through corporate author’s viewpoints was assessed; however, the authors’ intention of promoting corporate products and services is not evident in this study.

Motivations and Communication Attributes

This result initially identified the main purpose of corporate blogs, which share both information and industry insights/experiences. From the perspective of corporate executives, blogging provides the opportunity to convey their viewpoints to target audiences without dealing with mass media’s gatekeeping procedure, thus making blogs effective in message delivery. This being the case, it is evident that the goals of conveying information and industry insights and experiences act as the foundational reasons for establishing corporate blogs. Also, both social interaction and self-expression together account for the third main motivation for blogging. The motivation of corporate blog authors to express opinions through blogs’ feedback mechanism and to express personal thoughts freely is reasonable. In terms of the motivation for professional advancement, very few authors admit that their main goal for blogging is to promote their organizations or themselves for career purposes. Obviously, corporations put emphasis on

Weblogs’ function in sharing information and gathering opinions rather than the purpose of serving the organizational bottom line.

Gill (2004) suggested that the primary communication functional characteristics of a blog should include hyperlinks to related news articles, archives of old entries, blogrolls connected to other Websites, and syndication feeds such as RSS or XML. Study results revealed a relatively high degree of blogs providing archives (87.2%), subscriptions via blog feeds (87.2%), and blogrolls (77.6%). Other distinct attributes include the comment feedback mechanism, author’s profile, and use of photo/graphics (86.4%, 83.2% and

77.6% respectively). Offering personal information to readers, corporate blogs allow audiences to know “who is talking to them” and gain a clear idea of the author’s viewpoint, which is important for successful message delivery. Although two of thirds corporate blog’s URL are independent from organizational Websites, this study found that there is no difference between independent URL corporate blogs and dependent URL corporate blogs in terms of communication attributes. The correlation is founded that corporate blog’s URL is negatively correlated to providing author’s background information and email address. Dependent blogs provide less author’s background information and email address.

A possible reason to explain the negative correlation is that corporate blog readers have a prior knowledge when they enter the dependent corporate blogs because they know who is the author and his/her affiliated organizations. Independent corporate blogs, which is not under affiliated organizations need more author’s personal information, including his/her organizations to inform the readers who he/she is.

It was interesting to note that over 70 percent of blogs included recommendations of books the authors are currently reading. Overall, this result demonstrates that current corporate blog authors possess a general knowledge of the communication attributes required for running Weblogs. Furthermore, over half of corporate blogs provided readers

72 with email addresses of corporate authors. This finding fulfills Marken’s (2005) suggestion that corporate blogs should provide key contact information in order to create a positive relationship through dialogue with blog readers. As for the timeliness principle

(regular entries on blogs), this study used the method of dividing the total quantity of posts by the number of months to derive a convenient frequency. The average monthly entry quantity is 9.17 posts (N = 114, M = 9.17, SD = 15.18), or roughly two posts per week. However, this number may not reflect real entry times because the quantity of monthly post varies significantly, ranging from 124 posts to 0 per month. Additionally, anonymous comments are not generally allowed on corporate blogs. Most blogs have a review process to filter message content even when anonymous comments are permitted.

This result indicates that corporations tend to be wary of the uncontrollable content and wide spread speed over the Internet. Moreover, of the corporate blogs offering blogrolls,

65 percent provide connections to their affiliated organizations and are to some extent organization-centric.

Personal Nature and Narrative Features

Overall, posts did not demonstrate extraordinary levels of personal disclosure.

Analysis of 499 posts to determine levels of personal disclosure yielded a mean score of

2.34, lower than the median score of three. This finding refutes previous research on

Weblogs, which claim that Weblogs present a more intimate form of communication

(Balnaves et al., 2004). Also, compared with celebrity blogging about politics, which were identified as having explicit personal disclosure in blog content by Tramell (2004), the content of corporate blogs seems to be less personal and demonstrated lower levels of self expression. As for whether or not blogs address readers directly, corporate blogs tend to demonstrate one-way communication, and less than half of them address readers

73 directly. This finding coincides with the motivations for blogging. Corporate blogs tends to inform their audience of useful information and industry insights by one-way communication rather than implementing two-way discussions. Nevertheless, study results support the presence of human voice – conversational-style communication, and the practice of speaking in an optimistic and interesting tone was strong on corporate blogs. Researchers suggested that the personalized conversational form on Weblogs is a unique trait, fostering increased reader trust levels and satisfaction in organizational-public relationships (Kelleher & Miller, 2006).

However, the other two indexes regarding the use of human voice, invitation for dialogue and admitting mistakes, were found to be insignificant in this study. The determination of whether or not the author invites readers for engage in dialogue was made by looking for a blog’s display of explicit intentions for inviting readers to dialogue, such as “please tell me what you think” or “I want to know your opinions”.

Corporate authors usually extend such invitations to ask their readers’ opinions of corporate products. For instance, General Motor’s Vice Chairman Bob Lutz asks readers in most of his posts to share their opinions of newly launched cars by GM and encourages readers to talk about their consumer impressions of GM. In a post titled “Stop Me If

You’ve Heard This One Before” in February 26, 2006, Lutz wrote his thoughts regarding his purpose for using a corporate blog and asked for readers’ feedback regarding further improvements:

We can and will do a better job of advertising and communications in the traditional sense, but we need to step up our non-traditional communications and word of mouth and get our message directly to the people on a grass roots level. This blog is one example — but we need more avenues, and bigger ideas. What do you think?

This post successfully generated 322 comments after it was posted. As for admitting mistakes, only a few authors apologized for technician problems on their blog sites, and one admitted to issues regarding a newly released software product. Also, none of the blog authors apologized for misbehavior on the part of their corporations.

This study also assessed the attitude presented on corporate blogs toward competitors. Although Kelleher and Miller (2006) suggested providing links to competitors as a method to exteriorize human voice, corporate leaders seldom discuss their competitors publicly on their blogs. For example, Scott Gatz, Senior Director of

Personalization Products at Yahoo!, talked about his attitude with his readers in a January

25, 2006 post titled “Speak up! Shall I be a curmudgeon?”, saying,

But the real reason I haven’t been blogging lately is that I promised that this blog wouldn’t be a negative one. It wouldn’t be a place where I diss Yahoo or its competitors… I also have a bunch of more positive and/or constructive blog posts in my head now, so I plan to start blogging again.

When authors do discuss their competitors, positive reactions are demonstrated more often than negative critiques. Also, with 16.4 percent of blogs providing links to competitors indicates that the juxtaposition is partially supported in this study.

Topic Discussed on Corporate Blog

Consistent with authors’ chief motivation for corporate blogging, the most frequently discussed topic on corporate blogs is the industry in which the corporate leaders work (54.8%), followed by discussions about Internet technology (30.3%), blogging (27%), and their work places and colleagues (23.2%). Though industry news is the topic most discussed, most corporate blog authors provide disclaimers on their blogs in order to avoid triggering negative results such as rumors or smears to their

75 organizations in the blogosphere. For example, Steve Wilson, a senior director of global

Web communications at McDonald’s Corporation, stated the following disclaimer:

It should be pointed out that as this is my personal blog. The viewpoints and comments presented here are my own and in no way reflect the positions or interests of the McDonald’s Corporation, its partners, customers or clients.

Disclosure and policy, such as business confidentiality, is another sensitive issue for corporate blog authors. Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext, explained, “Views expressed on this Weblog are my own. I am not paid to write for anyone on this blog.”,

“My bias in favor of Socialtext should be obvious,” “Members of the Silicon Valley 100, so I get some free [perks] now and then, but will always disclose when I get it, if I am writing about it and what I will do with it”.

Realizing that public trust is built through honest and candid communication, most corporate leaders clarify their positions and separate personal opinions from affiliated organizations’ operational policy decisions. In addition, there is no data indicating that corporate blogs promote their affiliated organizations because corporate new products, initiatives, and publicity news are not main themes in the content of corporate blogs.

Controversial issues such as lawsuits and labor unions are the least discussed topics among the 15 categories, accounting only for 3.2 percent.

Due to the uncontrollable nature of Weblogs, disputes are rarely discussed via the

Internet. Also, fact-checking and peer review through trackbacks and hyperlinks can lead to more attention being placed on an organization’s negative news. Overall, the topics discussed by corporate authors seem not to concentrate on one specific issue. Unlike political blogs, which have specific timeframes and topics, corporate blogs present a broader spectrum of communication topics, from affiliated organizations to personal daily lives (23.2%). Tramell (2004) claimed that keeping day-to-day records on blogs

76 provides voyeuristic views of celebrity life and makes people feel celebrities are “normal people similar to reader themselves” (p. 87). This finding complements Edelman’s trust report (2006) that asserts that the majority of people trust “a person like yourself or your peer” in evaluating the credibility of information sources about a company. Therefore, appropriate self disclosure acts to positively enhance trust with key publics. To some extent, corporate leaders, who present the image of their organizations, can be viewed as celebrities. Certainly, the fact that corporate leaders add their own perspectives and sometimes share personal feelings and thoughts may close the gap between the readers and corporations and could even change public perceptions.

Corporate Statement

The category of “corporate statement” in this study refers to publicity items/ professional announcements, new products/services, new corporate initiatives/practices, controversies over organizations, news coverage of corporate leaders and announcements of corporate events. Overall, the presence of these topics is lower than 10 percent in the entire sample (N = 499). Similarly, indexes in corporate narrative sections, including emphasizing hope for the future and statement of philosophy/mission of affiliated organizations, presented in low percentages, 18.6% and 12.8% respectively. This study result reflects that the ultimate goal of corporate blogs is not promoting the corporations’ products or services; on the contrary, by speaking about industry-related topics in a conversational-style way, corporate blogs become a strategic tool to influence the public’s perceptions and enhance visibility of affiliated organizations. The study result found that the use of expert and authority opinions is not prevalent in the blogs assessed.

Corporate blog authors tend to position themselves as expert authorities (25.3%) rather than utilizing third-party authority opinions (21.8%). One possible reason is that authors

77 discuss information and knowledge of their familiar work industries; therefore, the corporate authors pose themselves as experts and do not perceive the need to incorporate other expert authorities into their blogs.

Implication for Online Public Relations

Results of this study suggest two implications for online public relations practitioners. First, the critical characteristics of blogs can be used to build and retain trust between organizations and key constituencies. Study results empirically supported

Kelleher and Miller’s (2006) study that blogs demonstrate a high level of conversation-style communication. As Kelleher and Miller (2006) pointed out, the conversational speaking tone used in blogs plays an important role in building and maintaining computer-mediated relationships. To extend this concept, corporate blogs can be used similarly in building trust and increasing relationship with publics. From a public relations perspective, the normative paradigm of symmetrical communication is two-way, balanced, and does not demonstrate manipulation of message delivery. Blogs offer opportunities for greater interactivity, transparent discussion, and participation in the communication process. Therefore, blogs become ideal places to practice two-way symmetrical communication.

The empirical data shows that most corporate blogs talk about business related topics such as industry news, entrepreneurship, and working organizations. Public relations practitioners should take advantage of the featured feedback mechanism of blogs (comments and trackbacks) and connecting function (blogrolls and hyperlinks) to listen to opinions and exchange thoughts with key publics. Notably, Weblogs are applicable to communicate with segments of the population instead of the mass population. Since blogs are opinion-driven and attract like-minded people to join the

78 discussions, this characteristic results in blog readers scoring the credibility of information coming from Weblogs as higher than those given by average people

(Mohanbir, 2005). In addition, Weblogs are suitable for setting corporate agenda, because there they are not subject to the gatekeeping process placed on mass media. Based on this fact, corporate blogs become a good channel to reach target audiences and achieve effective communication, building more trust than is possible through formal Websites and newsletters. Other suggestions for corporations start to blog should include language, ease for interface and who are the main readers of blogs.

As blogs have continued to grow and become a new alternative communication medium, the importance of credibility and trust is highlighted. Accountability and credibility are both important factors relevant to organizational public relationship building, both online and offline. According to Edelman’s trust report, the Internet has become the third largest media form that people accessed in 2006, which brings the accountability issue back to the accuracy and validity of information retrieved from

Internet sources. The blog format is regarded as trustworthy because it offers fact-checking through peer groups and hyperlinks to external sources. Also information presented by corporate leaders is seen as credible due to the “authentic voice” employed by top managers.

Once a corporation decides to launch a corporate blog, having long-term commitment and regular entries are necessary to maintain the corporate blog. Both practitioners and scholars emphasize the importance of honest, transparent and candid communication principles. Observations from this study suggest that the disclosure principle and feedback content management policy should be explained to blog readers as well. It is impracticable to expect to find confidential business information on corporate

79 blogs; however, it is anticipated that corporate authors can address or talk about his/her personal viewpoints on important corporate activities such as mergers and acquisitions after official announcements are released. This would allow corporate blogs to partake in meaningful interactions in terms of two-way communication.

The case of Walmart enlisting bloggers in a public relations campaign provided a good opportunity for pubic relations practitioners to consider which issues are suitable for the public to engage in discussion in the blogosphere. Corporate public relations department should know who their priority publics are and what issues are going to be discussed. Even public relations practitioners working for corporations without blogs should keep an eye on what is happening in the blogosphere as a crisis audit. Recent crisis cases to emerge in the blogosphere have involved Kryptonite locks and Dell computers. Rumors of easy-to-open Kryptonite locks and complaints about Dell’s unsatisfactory customer service spread through negative comments in the blogosphere.

The dissemination speed of negative news over the Internet is far faster than expected.

Overall, the rise of corporate blogs offers corporations a new channel to communicate with their key publics. However, it is like a double-edged sword. It can generate positive relationships and good discussion topics as well as portray negative news to publics.

Thus, by having knowledge of how to use this new communication tool wisely and making effective use of the unique communication traits blogs offer, corporate blog authors will be able to enhance corporate communication.

Limitations and Directions for Future Work

There are two limitations in this study. First, corporate blog authors include corporation workers, ranging from employees to top managers. This study only adopted blogs written by people in leadership positions in organizations, and this selectivity may

80 ignore other narrative features and writing topics demonstrated on employee blogs not assessed. Second, the results of the study sample including only 125 corporate blogs cannot be generalized to the whole corporate blogging population in terms of diffusion theory. In addition, industries presented by this study are limited to 10 categories and do not reflect the entire picture of thousands of industries across our social system.

Nevertheless, the empirical results of this study are still valid in offering a general description of Weblogs created by corporate leaders. Another sampling limitation involves the second coding round of content analysis on blog posts (N = 499). Posts were collected over a two-month span. This short time period may have resulted in discussion topics being limited. However, considered that blogs have existed for longer than one year in the blogosphere; the study drew blog posts according to each blog’s established history proportionally. This method ensures that the study acquired random sample posts fairly from each year and also reduces sampling errors.

Second, this study only addressed issues of motivations, discussion topics, and narrative features of corporate blogging by looking at blog posts and their functional communication attributes. Although study results revealed that blogs use a human voice to communicate with readers and offer a more satisfactory feedback mechanism than previous online communications, the actual interaction between blog authors and readership remains unexplored. Questions regarding how blog authors interact with their readers could be further analyzed by assessing blog posts, comments, and trackbacks.

Also, the consideration of whether the use of blogs influences the public’s perception of organizations and its potential to be a dialogical and trust building tool for organizations requires more future research. However, this descriptive study was just the foundational work for studying corporate blogs. Future studies should employ qualitative research

81 methods such as focus groups and in-depth interviews to understand the impacts of messages on blogs readers and the perceived attitudes of blog readers.

This study can serve as an adequate starting point for further research to investigate the features of corporate blogs and relations between and among the relevant key publics involving online public relations. The author suggests three directions of future research.

First, a follow-up longitudinal study on the diffusion of Weblogs and adoption behaviors among corporations is recommended to understand the practical implications of Weblogs for industry use. With the increasing numbers of corporate blogs, the application of blogs has become diversified and as serves a greater variety of purposes, such as promoting open discussion of corporate social responsibility (McDonald’s) and providing internal communications venues for employees (IBM). Specifically, the implications of online public relations such as what issues are appropriate for discussion in the blogosphere and who can be reached by blog medium are worthy of exploration.

Additionally, future research should develop more concrete indexes to evaluate the presence of human voice. The abstract concept of human voice should expand on its operational definition by accessing other disciplines of study, such as rhetoric and sociology. By doing so, the humanization concept offered by Weblogs can be understood more clearly. This study integrated literature reviews of human voice on celebrity and organizational blogs to evaluate the presence of humanization on corporate blogs. Since the measurement is not so relevant to business scenarios, more pertinent indexes of corporate issues need to be refined.

Finally, this study suggests that future work on Weblogs could further access their trust building and two-way dialogue potential. Research can integrate feedback features with the personal natures (the unique expression of personal viewpoints) through blog

82 communication to examine whether or not corporate blogging is a credible avenue for business communication. The relationship between the credibility of a spokesperson, usually a blog author, and the credibility and accuracy of information provided about the company is also a topic suitable for evaluation. As such, incorporating characteristics of blogs (feedback mechanism, humanization in conversation, responsive and instant communication) with aspects of trust building in relationships (integrity, dependability and competence) is a critical direction for future research.

APPENDIX A BLOGGING GLOSSARY