A taxonomy of corporate blog subtypes in map format
Sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words - especially when the picture is rather fussy and complicated. I’ve created a map of corporate blog subtypes, the functions they realize and the audiences they address. It’s clearly idealized, but I think it captures the essentials reasonably well.
Have a look at it here. I couldn’t fit it into a blog entry because, as you can see, it takes up quite a bit of screen space.
Thoughts?
Edit: don’t miss the comments.
(On Jun 16th, 2008 at 12:29 pm)
Hi Cornelius,
and thanks for assembling this chart! While you are certainly aware of Zerfass’ early categorization of blog types you’ve acordingly developed his ideas further. That’s great and from the perspective of an academic researcher this makes sense.
Interestingly I’ve used Zerfass’ overview in early corporate workshops I’ve conducted on the use of blogs. For the mostly corporate audience at that time this categorization has been more or less logic. For sure their main interest however has been the practical use of the insights contained. And this is where your overview (even though you are far more detailed on a positive side note) leaves me somehow puzzled as the categories you’ve chosen e.g. ‘Product, Image’ Executive Blog’ compare different domains and purposes and levels. Coming from a brand & design background this is quite obvious when it comes to ‘Product and Image’.
Accordingly an ‘Executive Blog’ is for sure affecting the ‘Image’ of an corporation while adding value to the perception of ‘Product’ at the same time (see Bob Lutz). On the same scale I wonder if it is relevant if a blog is edited by an individual or a team. In your chart this seems to be an important categorization (early on) that from my perspective is not too relevant at this level.
So I would love to see your thoughts framed in a chart that could be developed explicitly with the workshop audience (mentioned above) in mind. I’m sure that this ‘constraint’ will result in far more superior version than the one done by Zerfass some years back.
After all thanks for sharing your work
(On Jun 16th, 2008 at 5:14 pm)
Hey Ralf,
thanks for your feedback. Two attempts at creating a categorization that I was thinking of are the one by Zerfaß and a reasonably similar one by Schmidt ( in this article, I believe http://www.springerlink.com/content/v6113740k658761v/ ).
Let me address the points you make one by one:
“And this is where your overview (even though you are far more detailed on a positive side note) leaves me somehow puzzled as the categories you’ve chosen e.g. ‘Product, Image’ Executive Blog’ compare different domains and purposes and levels. Coming from a brand & design background this is quite obvious when it comes to ‘Product and Image’.”
Firstly, a concession I have to make is that my perspective on both the organizational structures which support company blogs and the strategic planning that goes on behind the scenes are limited. In other words, I haven’t described company blogs so much from the (strategic) corporate perspective, but from the perspective of the outsider. For this purpose, the three central questions guiding me have been:
a) Who writes the blog?
b) Who is the target audience?
c) What functions does the blog (presumably) realize?
As you point out, I mix these three levels in my map instead of keeping them neatly separated, but this is due to the fact that I believe they cannot be freely combined. The problem that I encountered (and, I think, that we are all struggling with) is that blogs are so versatile that they resist simple, clear-cut classification, while at the same time certain combinations of author-audience-purpose are much more typical than others.
Allow me to use Google’s company blog ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ ) as an example. It arguably realizes all perceivable functions, addresses all audiences and is basically written by ‘everyone’ at Google, i.e. a variety of employees from different departments and projects. It’s neither strongly personalized (which would not make sense, since there are many different authors), nor concerned with one specific issue, nor aimed at a single homogeneous audience.
“Accordingly an ‘Executive Blog’ is for sure affecting the ‘Image’ of an corporation while adding value to the perception of ‘Product’ at the same time (see Bob Lutz).”
Absolutely, no question about that. My classification is ‘ugly’ in that regard, but mostly so because there is no clean separation of author, audience and function. In the cases I’ve examined, I have found that blogs written by executives and CEOs appear to occupy a special space. A you point out, they address *all* levels of corporate strategy, but their authorship is distinct: they are written by executives and this arguably has an effect on how they are perceived. When you look at a blog like that of Jonathan Schwartz ( http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/ ) the degree of personalization (via the name ‘Jonathan’s Blog’, the photo etc) is striking. Schwartz makes frequent mention of himself in his writing (”I”). By contrast, if you look at the most recent entry by Omid Kordestani in the Google Blog about the deal made with Yahoo, you will not find a single first-person singular self-reference.
“On the same scale I wonder if it is relevant if a blog is edited by an individual or a team. In your chart this seems to be an important categorization (early on) that from my perspective is not too relevant at this level.”
See above - from my perspective it makes a very significant difference. A team blog may be still be authored by individuals, but they have a marked tendency to assume ‘the company voice’ (by which I mean “we” in favor of “I”). Team blogs are less frequently concerned with personal stories and issues than blogs written by a single author and my argument would be that they are also perceived differently by readers (i.e. less personal, more topical).
It is important to stress that I am approaching this purely from a descriptive perspective. To a corporate audience, the decisive questions are obviously ‘What strategic goals can we realize with a corporate blog?’, ‘How exactly do we implement it?’ and ‘How do we measure its success?’.
In contrast, I am mostly trying to answer three questions:
1. What goes on in the mind of a blogger when he writes a blog entry?
2. What goes on in the mind of a blog reader when he reads a blog entry?
3. How do bloggers and audiences conceptualize blogging? (i.e. is a blog a diary, a personal publication or column, a publications technology, a conversation…)
I hope that answering these abstract questions will eventually open the door to answering the more concrete ones (e.g. “How do we blog (more) effectively?”, “How do we measure the success of a blog?).
All that being said, I am very likely to change the labels used in the map somewhat, as I agree right away with you that my use of technical terms such as “image” and “marketing” is probably misleading.
Thanks once more for your feedback - it’s a discussion I hope to continue.