Aug 6th, 2007 | Blogging Studies, Corporate Blogging, Knowledge Blogging, Research | 1 Comment
I came across this post on Luis Suarez’ blog this morning. Luis received the following request from Mareike Swania from Napier University:
We are currently conducting research into the topic of internal blogging within companies. As part of this study we are inviting company bloggers to complete a short questionnaire in the form of an online survey available at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ZnU4C0g9B6oWQjeG5fGJog_3d_3d
The questions deal with some general questions about your blog, about your motivation to blog and the impact of your blog. All data collected will be anonymous, and in the written report of the research it will not be possible to identify the individuals who contributed to the study, nor their affiliations.
Should you be interested in the findings of the research once it is complete, there is a place on the survey to leave your email address to which a report will be sent. If you have any questions about the work, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you for participating
Mareike is being advised by Hazel Hall who has published extensively on knowledge management in institutional environments. Given that enough people participate (and it looks promising, as Mareike told me via email) this should produce quite interesting data.
Aug 4th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Blogging Studies, Corporate Blogging, Knowledge Blogging, Lilia Efimova, Microsoft | 6 Comments
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. 
Dec 4th, 2006 | Blogging Studies, Corporate Blogging | 2 Comments
Since I made this list a while ago I thought I might as well blog it. The studies are loosely sorted by freshness and perceived relevance. Let me know if I’m missing anything interesting.
Blogging Success Study (Backbone Media/Northeastern U)
Interviews with 20 corporate bloggers (qualitative). November 2006.
State of Corporate Blogging Survey (Makovsky)
Telephone interviews with a random selection of FT1000 companies, asked for their assumptions about blogging. February 2006.
Corporate Weblogs - Deployment, Promotion, and Measurement (Jupiter Research)
Behind a paywall. June 2006.
Blogging in the Enterprise (Guidewire)
Quantitative study. This is the source of the statement that 89% of all companies plan to start a blog by 2007. October 2005.
Corporate Blogging: is it worth the hype? (Backbone Media)
Detailed quantitative survey. July 2005.
Others:
Corporate Blog Learnings (PorterNovelli)
Blog Marketing for Ecommerce Sites (Marketing Sherpa)
Blogs: The new magic formula for corporate communications? (Deutsche Bank)
An Update from the Digital World (Morgan Stanley)
