Research into corporate blogging at Microsoft
While there is the occasional market research study into the adoption of blogs in corporate contexts and people are even thinking about metrics for measuring their success, things are still fairly lacking when it comes to in-depth academic research into what effect blogs have both on organizations and on how they are perceived. But that’s slowly changing. I’ve picked up these two very interesting articles recently, describing the use and acceptance of corporate blogs:
Efimova, L., & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press. [pdf]
Kelleher, T., and Miller, B. M. (2006). Organizational blogs and the human voice: Relational strategies and relational outcomes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 1. [html]
The focus in both articles is on employee blogs, which I find to be perhaps the most interesting subtype of company blogs for several reasons. If you are thinking about implementing blogs internally, have a look (and consider this as well).
On a side note: I never realized that Lilia Efimova has a blog (though in retrospect it seems fairly absurd to have assumed she doesn’t) and that it’s full of fascinating research on blogging at Microsoft (seriously Heather, you could have let me know*). That, and I find the way she uses flickr to annotate visualizations quite neat. Hmm, something new for my repertoire and Google Reader…
* I’m kidding of course. I have heard that quite a few people work at Microsoft (and Microsoft Research). I just thought I should ping you, the Microsoft blogger, about the article on Microsoft blogging. 
(On Aug 4th, 2007 at 9:06 pm)
I knew you were kidding. Aside from the fact that we have a large number of bloggers here, I did meet with Lilia when she was doing some research about 2 years ago. Alas, social networks are imperfect. It never crossed my mind to make the connection but duh, it should have.
(On Aug 4th, 2007 at 10:20 pm)
No worries. I think it’s a very interesting piece of research and I’m extremely curious about whether I can find any linguistic patterns which are typical for the knowledge management aspect of blogs that Lilia is interested in. I have a few ideas there.
(On Aug 4th, 2007 at 5:39 pm)
Thanks for the links - very useful, especially the Lilia Efimova blog. I’m looking at utilising some form social networking for my research project so these resources are very timely…
(On Aug 4th, 2007 at 6:31 pm)
Glad to help - the research is still fairly sparse, but that’s improving slowly.
(On Aug 4th, 2007 at 1:04 pm)
Thanks for the link
In case someone needs it - an overview of things (posts, papers) on Microsoft blogging - http://blog.mathemagenic.com/stories/2005/09/12/studyingWeblogsAtMicrosoft.html
(On Aug 4th, 2007 at 12:45 am)
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