Executive Blogging: Indian Corporate Heads in the Blogosphere

This study analyzes the content, usability, interactivity and connectivity of Indian executive blogs. Results indicate that among the Indian CEOs and top executives who blog, most are associated with the Information Technology and Internet sectors. A content analysis of the blogs shows that popular blogging topics include industry outlook, technology trends and tips, current affairs and insights on the economy. Executives working with privately-held companies blog more about their personal lives and topics such as entrepreneurship, marketing and advertising, and entertainment than those with public companies. The blog posts of these executives are often in the nature of individual opinions. The executives also provide actionable tips on various topics and products on their blog. While the blogs score high in the interactivity category and do reasonably well in the usability category, most suffer from poor connectivity in terms of providing links to other blogs and websites in the blogroll. Indian executive bloggers need to break out of their isolation and get better exposure by improving connectivity.

New Media, New Influencers and Implications for Public Relations

Marketers and public relations professionals today are confronted with an astounding array of new communications channels. Internet-based social media tools like blogs, podcasts, online video and social networks are giving voice to the opinions of millions of consumers. While mainstream media continues to play a vital role in the dissemination of information, even these traditional channels are increasingly being influenced by online conversations. The "new influencers" are beginning to tear at the fabric of marketing as it has existed for 100 years, giving rise to a new style of marketing that is characterized by conversation and community. Marketers are responding to these forces with a mixture of excitement, fear and fascination. They're alarmed at the prospect of ceding control of their messages to a community of unknowns. Yet at the same time they're excited about the prospect of leveraging theese same tools to speak directly to their constituents without the involvement of media intermediaries.The Society for New Communications Research set out to conduct an examination of how influence patterns are changing and how communications professionals are addressing those changes by adopting social media. The goals were to discover how organizations:Define new influencers;Communicate and create relationships with them;Use social media to create influence; andMeasure the effects of these efforts.Another goal of the study was to use these discoveries to offer a set of recommendations to professional communicators

The Hidden Side of Transparency among Government Agency Bloggers

This paper shows and discusses blogs as social action in a corporate context by investigating and seeking to understand organizational bloggers’ motivations and discursive behaviors in the contextual and cultural diversity of a\ud blog-setting. Providing empirical findings on the possibilities and limitations that are embedded in an organizational blog in a government agency context, traced\ud through focus group interviews of the organizational bloggers, the paper shows that culturally bound limitations exist and are exposed when implementing an open-source social technology like the weblog. People, even within the same organization, have different goals in relation to the same technology, and the transparency of the blog and the blog comments is managed differently by the internal bloggers. Through the discussion of the different cultural discourses at work in the blog, diverging roles and dilemmas that the blogging employees meet when engaging in corporate blogging are exposed and discussed. The aim of the paper is to discuss the social implications of these different cultural discourses in a corporate blog and how corporate cultural tensions emerge because of the blog. The paper pinpoints the problematic of transparency through pointing out conflicting goals, roles and the resulting self-censorship by bloggers as they operate in an environment that is increasingly transparent, and shows examples of\ud how the group of bloggers with the shared narrative tradition is able to mobilize its members and create subgroups for appropriate blog behaviors and changing\ud behavior due to self-censorship, as well as identification with the key actors in the group

How Design Plays Strategic Roles in Internet Service Innovation: Lessons from Korean Companies

In order to survive in the highly competitive internet business, companies have to provide differentiated services that can satisfy the rapidly changing users’ tastes and needs. Designers have been increasingly committed to achieving user satisfaction by generating and visualizing innovative solutions in new internet service development. The roles of internet service design have expanded from a narrow focus on aesthetics into a more strategic aspect. This paper investigates the methods of managing design in order to enhance companies’ competitiveness in internet business. The main research processes are to: (1) explore the current state of internet service design in Korea through in-depth interviews with professional designers and survey questionnaires to 30 digital design agencies and 60 clients; (2) compare how design is managed between in-house design groups and digital design agencies though the case studies of five Korean companies; and (3) develop a taxonomy characterizing four roles of designers in conjunction with the levels of their strategic contributions to internet service innovation: visualist, solution provider, concept generator, and service initiator. In addition, we demonstrate the growing contributions of the strategic use of design for innovating internet services, building robust brand equity, and increasing business performance. Keywords: Design Management; Internet Business; Internet Service Design; Digital Design; Digital Design Agency; In-House Design Group, Case Study</p

Mapping the Corporate Blogosphere: Linking Audience, Content, and Management to Blog Visibility

Blogs have been a common part of the Web for many years. Individuals create most blogs for their own purposes, but corporations have also begun to develop corporate blogs as a means for communicating with their stakeholders (e.g., customers, partners, investors). In this paper, we extend theory by generating what Gregor (2006) would call a type I theory. Specifically, we develop a theoretical framework for classifying and analyzing corporate blogs that examines blogs’ target audience, their content (focus and function), and how one should manage them. We use this framework to analyze the impact of these characteristics on the visibility of blogs operated by a sample of Fortune 500 companies. Our results show that a blog’s target audience and how its content and management fit with this audience can have significant impacts on blog visibility. We believe this framework provides a useful foundation for studying corporate blogs in the future

How do Global Organizations Build Employee Advocates Who Champion Their Brand

[Excerpt] Increasingly job applicants are focusing more on the image of the companies that they are applying to. 54% of online job seekers read company reviews before deciding to join and 75% of job seekers consider the employer brand before deciding to apply to a job. A staggering 69% of would-be employees would not accept a job from a company with a bad employer brand even if the alternative was no job at all. Additionally, positive employer brands can have positive effects on a company\u27s bottom line. A study found that positive employer brands can lead to reductions in turnover and cost-per-hire, as well as an increase in qualified applicants and time to hire. These statistics show the strategic importance of focusing on an employer brand that delivers for potential applicants. In the following research we will determine the best strategy for building an employer brand through a company’s own employees

Blogging: an opportunity for librarians to communicate, participate and collaborate on a global scale

Blogs are an important element of the second generation of the web; or ‘Web 2.0’ as it is commonly referred to. ‘Web 2.0’ refers to the evolution from static "read only" web pages (Web 1.0) to dynamic, interactive pages encouraging users to create, interact and share content across multiple applications (O’Reilly, 2005). Blogging, along with other Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, wikis, social bookmarking, photo sharing, video sharing, and microblogging, form part of the emergent ‘social media’ family; a collection of online tools that encourage users to communicate, participate, and collaborate on a global scale. Many library and information professionals have embraced blogging as a platform to document their career, enhance their profile, network with other librarians; and share anecdotes about their lives as librarians. The aim of this article is to present a brief overview of the history of blogs and a short review of literature related to blogging, libraries and reference librarians. It will also provide a list of recommended blogs, a discussion of the advantages of reading and writing blogs and some top tips for starting up your own blog

Conventions and mutual expectations — understanding sources for web genres

Genres can be understood in many different ways. They are often perceived as a primarily sociological construction, or, alternatively, as a stylostatistically observable objective characteristic of texts. The latter view is more common in the research field of information and language technology. These two views can be quite compatible and can inform each other; this present investigation discusses knowledge sources for studying genre variation and change by observing reader and author behaviour rather than performing analyses on the information objects themselves

Towards an understanding of corporate web identity

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