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

Abstract

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.