Blogs or Flogs? Genre Conventions and Linguistic Practices in Corporate Web Logs

Slide 1: Blogs or Flogs? Genre Conventions and Linguistic Practices in Corporate Web Logs Cornelius Puschmann University of Düsseldorf cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de Telematica Instituut 31 August 2007

Slide 2: Contents of this presentation A) Research context B) What's a corporate blog anyway? C) Why do companies blog? D) Three strategic approaches: conforming with, flouting or subverting conventions E) Observations

Slide 3: Research context

Slide 4: The project Doctoral thesis project: The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication Focus survey of a new form of domain-specific publishing ● linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects ● Questions What functions do corporate blogs realize? ● How do corporate blogs play with existing genre conventions? ●

Slide 5: Data web feeds (RSS/Atom) are used to retrieve, store and analyze language data ● automated part-of-speech annotation ● 161 English-language sources (133 corporate blogs, 18 personal, 1 political, 1 ● technical) 3 press editorial sections (New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times) ● 5 press release sections (Microsoft, GM, Sun, Oracle, McDonald's) ● 29,528 blog posts ● 7,821,317 words ●

Slide 6: What's a corporate blog anyway?

Slide 7: An example: GM FastLane like a personal blog, but the owner is a company?

Slide 8: A lot of different terms on the market “enterprise blogging” ● “corporate blogging” ● “business blogging” ● “employee blogging” ● “paid blogging” ● ... ●

Slide 9: My pragmatic definition A blog written and maintained by the employees of a company that is used to further organizational goals. Blogs can fulfill intra- or extra-organizational functions marketing ● public relations ● customer relations management ● recruiting ● knowledge management ● communication ●

Slide 10: Organizational and functional types of corporate blogs Five different types grouped according to authorship and function:

Slide 11: Organizational and functional types of corporate blogs Five different types grouped according to authorship and function: product blog

Slide 12: Organizational and functional types of corporate blogs Five different types grouped according to authorship and function: product blog, image blog

Slide 13: Organizational and functional types of corporate blogs Five different types grouped according to authorship and function: product blog, image blog, knowledge blog

Slide 14: Organizational and functional types of corporate blogs Five different types grouped according to authorship and function: product blog, image blog, knowledge blog, strategy blog

Slide 15: Organizational and functional types of corporate blogs Five different types grouped according to authorship and function: product blog, image blog, knowledge blog, strategy blog, multi-purpose blog

Slide 16: Corporate blogging ethics? Robert Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto (2003) http://scoble.weblogs.com/2003/02/26.html #1 Tell the truth #2 Post fast on good news or bad #3 Use a human voice code of conduct, “behavior beats #5 Have a thick skin bottom line” #7 Talk to the grassroots first #8 If you screw up, acknowledge it #14 If you don't have the answers, say so

Slide 17: Companies that blog

Slide 18: Why do companies blog?

Slide 19: A communicative crisis? 1. Individualized communication The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) 2. Opaque style of marketing / PR = too much noise http://www.cluetrain.com/ 3. But: all communication is goal-oriented! #1 Markets are conversations. #2 Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. #3 Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. #4 Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. #5 People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

Slide 23: Communicating vs. Publishing publishing (written) interpersonal communication (spoken) spontaneous planned discursive monologic qualified constative transient persistent contextual non-contextual

Slide 24: What's so special about blogs? blogs are the first truly personal publishing platform ● blogs combine the qualities of publishing (one-to-many, asynchronous, no ● feedback) and interpersonal communication (one-one, synchronous, feedback) they have “hard” technically conditioned conventions... ● segmentation of texts into posts ● title, date and author with each post ● reverse chronological order of items ● permalinks ... ● ... and “soft” communicative conventions ● first-person voice (“I think it is a good thing that X” vs. “It is a good thing that X”) ● meta-language (“I just wanted to blog about this”) ● interactional queues are usually literal (“What do you think?” means “Leave a comment!”) ● author and publisher are usually identical (“I” means “I, writer”, “I, publisher” and “I, ● blog owner”) ...

Slide 25: Implications for corporate blogging people can communicate, companies can't ● the “corporate voice” is an invention ● press releases, advertisements etc either have no discernible referents or ● “simulate” conversations (“here at Company X, we are trying to make your life better”) this worked fine in mass media (no feedback), but fails in feedback media ● such as blogs Since companies can't communicate, how can they blog?

Slide 26: Three strategic approaches: conforming, flouting or subverting conventions

Slide 27: Strategy #1: Conforming use of “I”, “we”, “Dell” and “you” = clear reference meta-language: “I've been getting comments...” clear and overt goal of the exchange (customer service) author is discernible

Slide 28: The trouble with conforming “Spokesperson syndrome”: any time an employee expresses a (personal) ● opinion it can be interpreted as the official standpoint of the company no more clear, carefully targeted messages ● individuals take the spotlight, companies get the limelight ● personal communicative goals can take priority over those of the company ● Useful if... a neutral, third-party view is needed to ease an image problem (Scoble) ● behavior beats bottom line ●

Slide 29: Strategy #2: Flouting no use of “I”, no discernible author instead, use of the “corporate we” who am I talking to? who is the author?

Slide 30: The trouble with flouting risk of being accused of “not getting it” ● risk of being ignored ● what function does this realize? ●

Slide 31: Strategy #3: Subverting there's an author... but he's fictional this blog has both fictional and real authors

Slide 32: The trouble with subverting if you get caught you're in deep trouble (Wal-Mart flog incident) ● subverting is the strategy for pursuing covert goals ● problem A: you are cheating, problem B: that you are cheating suggests that ● you have a hidden agenda can you build real trust with fictional characters? ●

Slide 33: E) Observations

Slide 34: Observations blogs are profoundly personal platforms of communication ● this means that organizations must individualize corporate relations if they ● want to utilize blogs this is associated with a number of risks ● traditional, control-based approaches to marketing and PR are least effective ● in the context of blogs, unless one resorts to flouting or subverting new approaches are ● hard to predict in their precise effect ● hard to replicate ● highly dependent on the individual bloggers expertise, sensitivity etc ● only effective in the long term ●

Slide 35: Thanks for listening!

Slide 36: Blogs or Flogs? Exploring and Exploiting Genre Conventions and Linguistic Practices in Corporate Web Logs Cornelius Puschmann University of Düsseldorf cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de Telematica Instituut 31 August 2007

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