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

Blogs or Flogs? Genre Conventions and Linguistic Practices in Corporate Web Logs Cornelius Puschmann University of Düsseldorf [email_address] Telematica Instituut 31 August 2007

Contents of this presentation
Research context
What's a corporate blog anyway?
Why do companies blog?
Three strategic approaches: conforming with, flouting or subverting conventions
Observations

Research context

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?

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

What's a corporate blog anyway?

An example: GM FastLane

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

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

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

product blog

product blog, image blog

product blog, image blog , knowledge blog

product blog, image blog , knowledge blog , strategy blog

product blog, image blog , knowledge blog , strategy blog , multi-purpose blog

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
#5 Have a thick skin
#7 Talk to the grassroots first
#8 If you screw up, acknowledge it
#14 If you don't have the answers, say so
code of conduct, “behavior beats bottom line”

Companies that blog

Why do companies blog?

A communicative crisis?
The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)
http://www.cluetrain.com/
#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.

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

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”) ...

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?

Three strategic approaches: conforming , flouting or subverting conventions

Strategy #1: Conforming author is discernible

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

Strategy #2: Flouting instead, use of the “ corporate we”

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

Strategy #3: Subverting there's an author... but he's fictional

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?

E) Observations

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

Thanks for listening!

Blogs or Flogs? Exploring and Exploiting Genre Conventions and Linguistic Practices in Corporate Web Logs Cornelius Puschmann University of Düsseldorf [email_address] Telematica Instituut 31 August 2007

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

by Cornelius Puschmann on Sep 01, 2007

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