Organisational blogs: benefits and challenges of implementation (original) (raw)

Overview on a Special Issue about Organizational Bloggging.

This Special Issue contains six papers dealing with different aspects of organizational blogging. The common theme of the papers is the emerging importance of this exploding new medium which can produce enormous value to the organization but with potential risks.

Abstract Weblogs, or blogs are radically changing the face of communication within enterprises. While at the minimum blogs empower employees to publicly voice opinion and share expertise, collectively they improve collaboration and enable internal business intelligence. Though the power of blogs within organizations is well accepted, their properties, structure and utility has not yet been formally analyzed.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate executives of companies are using blogging as a new communications channel.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents an overview of the blogging phenomenon, placing it in context of the larger growth of Web 2.0 and user‐generated content. The paper provides the reader with a primer on blogs and how they can be used effectively by executives, as well as looking at the importance of monitoring the blogosphere for what is being said by and about a company.FindingsOver 50 corporate CEOs were found who are presently engaged in blogging. The research also identifies companies where employees have been fired for blogging and presents best practices in blogging and blog policies.Research limitations/implicationsThe principal limitation of the research is that as blogging is a rapidly growing and evolving area, the present results on executive blogging are accurate only for the moment. The implications of this research are that...

This article proposes a general model to analyze and compare different uses of the blog format. Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action. As a result, “communities of blogging practices” emerge-that is, groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of blogs as a tool for information, identity, and relationship management. This analytical framework can be the basis for systematic comparative and longitudinal studies that will further understanding of similarities and differences in blogging practices.

This article discusses how interactions in organisational blogs participate in the emergence of the organisation itself. Based on the principles of The Montreal School of Organisational Communication, the paper reflects on how the recursive relationship between texts and conversations in blogs mobilises the organisation and contributes to its continuing creation. In order to conduct this argument, the concept of social media, uses of organisational blogs and the main contributions of The Montreal School are analysed. Finally, by discussing examples of four genres of organisational blogs, we demonstrate how they contribute to the definition of the organisation. Beyond their promotional potential, the blog's role as co-creator of the organisation is highlighted.

This article looks at organizational blogger roles and how they both reflect and affect the way knowledge is communicated across department boundaries in a corporate blogging context. The blog is approached from a sociotechnical perspective, addressing and looking into the various roles in a community of practice and the enactment of the bloggers in a transparent context. Empirical examples of discourses at work in an organizational blog are highlighted, and the diverging roles and dilemmas of the blogging employees are discussed. People within the same organization have different goals in relation to the same technology, and the content of the blog and the blog comments are managed differently by the internal bloggers which feel empowered or disempowered. The article pinpoints roles of enactment in a socio-technical perspective through pointing out conflicting goals, roles and the resulting counter discourses and shows examples of how the group of bloggers with the shared narrative...