Jun 2nd, 2008 | Corporate Blogging, Definitions, Google, Research, Style | 1 Comment
I’ve just skimmed over this interesting post by Ron Ploof about the challenges of corporate blogging.
Here’s one point in the piece that caught my attention in particular:
3. Being conversational is unnatural:
Being conversational is unnatural in business communications because we’ve been taught NOT to do it. Communication specialists are used to writing “Press Releases” and marketing web pages. The good news is that outside of work, employees are very good conversationalists, so they already know how to do it, they just need to break some of their Old Media habits. Training works very well in this area. Lastly, companies cannot forget the most important ingredient of a corporate blog — transparency. Corporate blogs are conversational and transparent, and therefore should NEVER be used to spew traditional marcom drivel.
I have been thinking about the style of blogs and corporate blogs in particular for almost two years now. The persistent chant ‘blogs are conversations’ and ‘conversational good, business-speak bad’ has a tendency to drive the professional linguist in me nuts, not because I don’t agree with these popular ideas, but because I keep wondering what exactly conversational means and why it is unequivocally regarded as ‘better’.
Now, as I am gradually approaching the completion of my thesis, I think can give a carefully weighed answer to that question.
Blogs are conversations? Partly yes, partly no
Firstly, when bloggers talk about ‘conversational’ what exactly do they mean?
Real-life conversations between human beings use many expressions that depend on the situational context to be understood. Things like that guy standing right there (so-called deictic expressions), false starts (And I was…. we didn’t go… No, Sue and I didn’t go to the meeting) and fillers (We need to… umm… discuss this in more detail) abound in face-to-face talk. Conversations also typically contains a lot of signals that serve purely to confirm and validate what your communicative partner is saying (things like yeah, okay, gotcha, right, uh-huh, nodding etc) and indicate your stance and social relationship. While conversations in TV shows, plays, novels and so forth are fast, witty and fluent, real conversations are often anything but - it’s just that we’re very good at ignoring all the noise they contain. We subconsciously filter out most of the static.
Blogs are obviously different in that blog entries are planned and not spontaneous (forget all the cutesy rhetoric associated with the word spontaneous for a moment - I use it to simply mean ‘instantly expressed’). Many bloggers, and most certainly the majority of corporate bloggers will read a post they have written thoroughly before publishing it. In the case of marketing and PR-oriented blogs and with executive blogs such as that of Jonathan Schwartz it is safe to assume that an entire team of communications professionals reads, discusses and edits posts collaboratively before they are published. There is planning and polishing involved, none of which is possible in real-time conversation.
So it’s not that aspect of blogs that makes us think of face-to-face conversations. What we associate with interpersonal communication is the interactive nature of blogs - in other words, that they enable a dialog between blogger and reader. Our reasoning goes: ‘I can respond to what someone writes in their blog, so it is basically like a conversation’. The other aspect is language; the content and style of writing that is associated with blogs. Note that point - blogs are written, not spoken language, which means that none of the ‘noise’ described above in occurs in them. Many things characteristic for spoken language never occur in blogs, especially not corporate ones.
Subjective as conversational
So apart from interactivity, what else is conversation-like about (corporate) blogs?
Have a look at this excerpt from One Louder, the blog of Microsoft staffing manager Heather Hamilton:
I’m not sure what has gotten into me other than the fact that I am happier than I have been for a VERY long time. It’s funny how sometimes things can just fall into place. The changes that I wanted to have happen at work happened without me doing much about it (other than saying “this is what I want”). I have finally started to spend some weekend time relaxing (and hanging with friends). And I am starting to believe what Eckhart Tolle says about coincidences not happening; it’s all for a reason (and with most of my life, I get the reasons for even some of the unpleasant things happening). Example: last week my manager and I were talking about me needing to travel to one of our dev centers. She recommended Ireland (oh yeah, I am totally doing that!) and I said “why don’t we have a dev center in Amsterdam? I really want to go there.” Then this week, I got an e-mail inviting me to speak at a conference in Amsterdam. How ’bout that? I’ve decided not to question what forces (if any) could be invovled with things like that happening. I’m just going to enjoy it.
In addition to business-related topics, Heather frequently writes about her personal feelings, thoughts and experiences in her blog, something that I’ve found to be typical of what I call ‘personal company blogs’. Such blogs are written by just one person, have a clearly visible reference to the blogger on the front page (name, photo) and are often part of a larger company blog hub (MSDN, in this case). In contrast to personal company blogs, team company blogs are usually about a specific product, issue or segment of the company and have several authors. I’ve found that writing about personal thoughts and feelings is less common in team blogs, largely because the topical focus of the blog tends to override personal concerns. By contrast, personal company blogs tend to be understood by their owners as diaries or journals where work-related subjects are integrated with personal thoughts.
Now, keep in mind how Heather writes and then have a look at this very interesting research on business English, conducted by Mike Nelson, an applied linguist at the University of Turku. Read Mike’s short article in the Guardian for a summary of his findings.
The kind of language used in corporate contexts (pre-blogging) is fairly strictly focused on a fixed set of topics. To quote Mike:
The world of business found in real life language is a limited one made up of business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, places of business, time, modes of communication and vocabulary concerned with technology. The language found was surprisingly positive, with very few negative words featuring at all. It was also found to be dynamic and action-orientated and non-emotive.
What Mike found via his large database of language samples from real-life business settings was that corporate language largely centers on things associated with business, namely business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, places of business, time et cetera and that these things are generally presented positively (business is about getting things done, not about being self-reflexive or critical). Finally, the subjective emotions of stakeholders aren’t really very important - private matters don’t feature into corporate discourse in any significant way.
Now compare that to how Heather writes. It’s a world of difference.
In posts marked with the ‘personal blogging’ tag, Heather writes about aspects of everyday life that we are all familiar with: buying furniture and cleaning out the garage, cheering for a sports team and experiencing a blackout. Not everything is always positive - there are ups and downs. Heather’s language can certainly be described as ‘emotive’ or ‘involved’, not because it is necessarily always highly emotional, but because it is concerned with inner processes more than with actions. All of this is obviously in stark contrast to what language in most other corporate contexts looks like.
There are a number of reasons why a ‘conversational’ style in that sense of the word is typical for both non-corporate and personal company blogs and why I expect it to have an influence on how institutions communicate, present themselves and are perceived in the future. I’ll focus on three basic pillars: audience, content and style.
Who you talk to
Blogs are a part of the Internet and the Internet provides virtually anyone with near-universal access to information. This may seem like a truism, but it has significant implications. Whereas before groups of stakeholder would be targeted individually and the flow of information was highly controlled, this is no longer the case in a networked world. A careful examination of the Google-Sicko story reveals a case of audience underfitting, i.e. a company employee addressing a specific audience but effectively reaching a much broader readership (and, in this case, not with a positive result).
The problem encountered is the extreme reach and transparency of online publishing. Because we are used to addressing either individuals or select communities of people, suddenly reaching a diffuse, invisible and potentially vast audience is not always easy to handle. This is especially problematic when you talk about people who are also your readers (see the Google example).
What you talk about
One notable aspect of Heather’s blog (and many others like it) is how openly it presents personal thoughts, experiences and feelings to readers. This is not necessarily done just for the audience. It seems that many personal company bloggers, though quite aware that their blogs are public, write partly to record their thoughts for themselves much in the same way that diarists do. The blog is a chronicle of what the blogger has thought, felt and done over time, both personally and professionally. Not every personal detail imaginable is presented, but there is no strict (and artificial) separation of personal and professional topics. Independently of how bloggers conceptualize audience, the effect of sharing personal information is that it lays the foundation for relationship-building.
Being told the subjective impressions, thoughts and emotions of another human being is almost inevitably relevant to us because we value such social information very highly. Knowing personal aspects of someone’s life brings us closer to them and establishes ties which are the foundation of any interpersonal relationship. This is especially pivotal on the Internet where all voices are detached from the individuals who use them. Social information enables us to establish a relationship with someone whom we have never met, because what we know about someone allows us to draw an increasingly complete picture of what kind of person they are.
Social information as a universal currency is especially valuable in a globalized and networked world, because exchanging it builds trust and without trust the foundation for other interactions is lacking.
How you say it
There is a persistent belief that jargon, technical language and other forms of special purpose lingo exist purely to irritate those of us who don’t understand it. That’s not true quite true though - medical language or legalese may have that effect on people who aren’t doctors or lawyers, but among those who speak them these varieties are readily understood and used for plausible reasons. Jargon allows us to
- delineate membership in an expert community (techies, lawyers, bloggers…)
- describe aspects of our work/community/culture/shared experience with more perceived precision than ’standard’ language allows
In other words, we often feel that what we want to say is said more effectively when we use a specialized vocabulary developed to express it. While this is unproblematic as long as we are talking to others who share our knowledge, this instantly turns into an issue when we address a broader audience - which is inevitably the case with a blog. All of a sudden, use of a specialized terminology makes us aloof, arrogant and out of touch. Audience underfitting once again leads to problems, this time in stylistic terms.
Finally, ‘conversational’ in stylistic terms also implies the use of colloquialisms, figures of speech and other expressive elements which are typically found in spoken conversation. The effect of such devices is again that they allow blogger and audience to conceptualize the blog as a speech situation, amplifying feelings of solidarity and familiarity.
What ‘conversational’ can mean
To summarize, ‘conversational’ can mean a range of things when applied to blogs. Among them are:
- interactivity - it can describe the dialogic structure of blogs and the possibility to respond to contributions
- speaker and audience - it can describe the discourse situation that the blog creates on a technical level and the resulting possibility for the blogger to refer to himself/herself (”I”) and address his/her readers (”you”)
- content - it can describe a focus on personal and everyday topics which are familiar to a broad audience and create a feeling of solidarity and familiarity with the blogger
- style - it can describe the avoidance of jargon and technical language (due to its audience-restrictiveness) in favor of expressions that evoke spoken language and real-life conversation
As always, feedback is appreciated.
Jan 26th, 2007 | Charlene Li, Corporate Blogging, Definitions, ROI of Blogging | No Comments
I know my posts have been both pretty academic and infrequent recently, so here’s something juicy for a change. It’s a follow-up on the earlier work done by Charlene Li and others at Forrester regarding corporate blogging ROI.
Here are two great quotes from Charlene’s post:
Q: Is there a standard ROI for blogs? A: Nope – sorry, it isn’t that easy! Just as there isn’t a standard ROI for a Web site, there’s no standard for a blog. It depends on what the goal of the blog is and also how much investment the company (and the blogger) puts into it.
Anything resembling something like a standard ROI would have made me very skeptical. I’m not a business analyst, but I am getting a better and better impression of how corporate blogs work from analyzing them textually, and as Charlene observes, these goals are simply too diverse for a single metric. One things I’m curious about and that is part of my research is whether these goals in different kinds of corporate blogs - product blogs, PR blogs, blogs for knowledge-sharing - have an impact on style. Another (though very tricky) question is closely related to ROI: is there a correlation between style and blog success? A lot of people argue that a certain kind of style is “good blogging”, but is it possible to verify that empirically?
Q: But this is heresy - you can’t put the benefits of a blog on a spreadsheet! You’ve just got to believe that blogs are a good thing because they develop conversations with customers. A: At the core of my bleeding heart pumps the soul of a pragmatist. Sure, I buy into all of the positive, feel good reasons to have a blog. But when your manager asks why the company has a blog versus spending more time and resources on XYZ initiatives, it sure would be helpful to be able to show a spreadsheet of those blogging benefits in dollars and cents.
I think it’s important that she acknowledges both the need for metrics and the lack of precision of such measures when it comes to blogging. In other words: we should measure this stuff, otherwise we’re just following an unsubstantial intuition (”blogging is great”). But at the same time we should be aware that these measures are pretty rough approximations and that the metrics we use need to be context-sensitive. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Dec 11th, 2006 | Corporate Blogging, Cox Communications, Definitions, GE, McDonald's, Microsoft, Novell, Wells Fargo | 8 Comments
Here’s a list of explanations of the term blog, taken from seven different corporate sites:
Blogs are Web pages which are updated frequently, written from the point of view of an individual, written in an informal tone, and usually expose (sic) an RSS feed for syndication.
from: Microsoft Community Blogs
While we provide a Cox point of view, we also shoot for a balanced discussion that’s light on bull and heavy on substance. We air third-party commentary and even views from those who just might disagree with us.
from: DigitalStraightTalk (Cox)
We live in a constantly changing world where the issues are complex and solutions anything but simple. With such complex issues, we may not always agree on the root causes or best solutions, but we can have a conversation.
from: Open for Discussion (McDonald’s)
We hope that, through this blog, understanding the trials and successes that communities have experienced in natural disasters will propel you to develop your plans for disaster preparedness.
from: Guided by History (Wells Fargo)
From Edison’s Desk [..] offers a unique forum for technology enthusiasts around the globe to discuss the future of technology with top researchers from one of the world’s largest and most diverse industrial research labs.
from: From Edison’s Desk (GE)
Novell Open PR gives Novell watchers information about what’s happening in the company that might not make the cut for a press release, but is still of interest to the market and Novell’s customers.
from: Novell Open PR (Novell)
A blog (short for web log) is a web site containing dated entries. Think of it like an online journal. Blogs are usually written in the first person by an individual or group of folks, and they update regularly, sometimes every day. There are many different kinds of blogs […].
from: Earthling (Earthlink)
I’ve collected this little round-up of quotes to show that there is hardly a consistant view of what a blog is or does in the corporate world (not that there was any reason to assume otherwise).
The definition to fall back on is the strictly formal-technical one: blogging is a form of web-based publishing and blogs are websites (or parts of websites) which are managed via a specialized content-mangement software. They usually consist of entries displayed on the main page in reverse chronological order and usually have an archive of older entries. Beyond that - i.e. when thinking about the possible functions of blogs - things get a lot more complicated.
The reason for the high degree of variation is that the blogs listed above serve a variety of purposes, and each applies its own “blogging philosophy” to the explanation given. At the same time, I think it’s safe to assume that the blogging practices of those companies are also shaped by what they believe (”good” / “real” / “correct” etc) blogging to be. Let’s look at a few definitions.
Microsoft lists four aspects, one formal (post frequency), one technical (”exposing” RSS feeds) and two stylistic ones (point of view and informal tone). The technical ones aren’t entirely unproblematic. Is it not a blog if I post infrequently? Is every source which provides - sorry, exposes - an RSS feed a blog? But these things are commonly cited because stylistic aspects are even harder to nail down. “Informality” is very much in the eye of the beholder (see here for one end of the scale, here for the other). College professors, teenagers, CEOs and housewives all have their own understanding of what informal language looks (or sounds) like. And what about personal point of view? It seems to apply to most blogs, but there are counter-examples. For example, the Thomson Holiday Blog currently has a word count of several thousand strings in my database, with a mere four instances of the personal pronoun “I”. It is also posted anonymously (as are many product blogs) and comments are quite scarce.
Cox completely omits formal aspects and highlights content instead, committing itself to “substance” and a “balanced discussion” which is contrasted with “bull”. The discursive quality of blogs - different parties expressing controversial opinions - is marked here as the most important characteristic of the blog. The almost complete lack of comments in Digital Straight Talk speaks a somewhat different language. Cox seems to be experimenting with a sort of talk-radio approach to blogging, especially when smacking about its favorite competitor.
McDonald’s similarly highlights discussion (or - subtly toning it down - conversation). The Open for Discussion blog is a part of the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy. It is authored by the senior director for CSR, Bob Langert, and his staff. Open for Discussion is interesting because it presents the example of a much-criticized company walking on a sort of public relations blogging tightrope. Langert responds to comments quite frequently - a practice which is absolutely not the norm, especially in a blog that is so clearly image-related. Many of the comments are highly critical of McDonald’s’ business practices and accuse the company of using the CSR initiative purely for cosmetic effect (see this exchange). The challenge to Langert and Co. is to be as diplomatic as possible, while never being too drastic in the acknowledgment of possible mistakes. The discursive practice and McDonald’s’ openness in engaging in it with the public takes precedence over the issues, because the issues remain controversial (”we may not agree […] but we can have a discussion”). That is not to say that the company isn’t serious about the CSR program, but showing McDonald’s’ ability to accept criticism without admitting defeat seems to be the key function of the Open for Discussion.
Wells Fargo and GE don’t care too much about the ontological status of blogs but get right down to business. Guided by History (Wells Fargo) relates the stories of natural disasters to remind us to get insurance… why not from Wells Fargo? Similarly, GE’s focus is on research on the topical level, but on the functional level From Edison’s Desk is about image and possibly recruiting. Both are innovative strategies in my opinion, and they contradict the idea that some kind of constant visible interaction with a community (e.g. via comments) is always an equally vital measure of blog success. GE doesn’t need to appeal to just everybody: what counts is that junior researchers and tech journalists will see the blog as an indicator of the company’s innovativeness.
Novell makes an interesting qualitative distinction when announcing to blog things that might not make the cut for a press release. Press releases are given the “official” and “universally relevant” stamps, whereas blog entries are characterized as containing more general-purpose, less essential information. This hierarchy of relevance is hardly surprising, considering that press releases are an entrenched form of text while blogs are still young. Question is, of course, why the two are regarded as separate concepts at all, especially when assuming the former to be a kind of text and the latter to be a mode of publishing? Why not blog press releases? What about the technology of a blogging software makes it necessary to write differently or present different information than you would with a PM?
Alright, I’ve decided to stick the rest of this round-up into another post because, as usual, I’m far from done. Yeah, so much for writing shorter entries 
Aug 19th, 2006 | Corporate Blogging, Definitions, Thesis | 2 Comments
As I’ve laid out in my first post, the purpose of this blog is to explore corporate blogging as a new form of business communication. One distinction that the most casual observer will notice right away is that corporate blogs fall into certain categories regarding who writes them, what their purpose is and whom they target. I want to make a first attempt at developing such a categorization here and I also want delineate the genre as such, i.e. what ‘counts’ as a corporate blog in my research and what doesn’t. Let’s start with the latter.
Per my working definition, corporare blogs are: Blogs that are written and maintained by corporate affiliates, speaking on behalf of their employer, that exist for the purpose of communicating with others in a way that is meant to benefit the company or industry. Blogs which are concerned purely with consulting, public relations or blog-related services for other businesses are not included.
The important exclusion here is of those who have made blogging a business for themselves, be it through consulting, blog hosting or as a personal business model. It is helpful to make this distinction for several reasons. Firstly, consulting and PR-related blogs have completely different stakes in blogging than do companies from other industries. They are concerned almost exclusively with promoting the practice of blogging (after all, that’s their business model) and with commenting on the performances of the ‘real’ actors and how blogging helps (or hurts) their business. Secondly, professional bloggers - usually journalists, academics, activists, experts in a professional context such as business or technology etc - have an interest primarily in keeping their readers informed and entertained. As there is no aspect of business outside of blogging that immediatly concerns them, their stakes are also different.
In a second step, I have also chosen to focus on larger companies in favor of start-ups and companies in general in favor of individuals, though there are some exceptions to this rule. The selection for my list is fuzzy in some regards, however, I believe that it is consistent enough to prove functional with a large enough sample. Obviously few blogs - corporate or otherwise - are created with the need to conform with neat genre categories in mind.
Taking all this into account, I have so far found four different types of corporate blogs which all conform to my definition, but differ considerably in regards to authorship, purpose and audience.
A. Expert Blogs
B. Executive Blogs
C. Product Blogs
D. Image Blogs
Before I look at the individual categories, note these four types conflate the question of Who writes them? with What are they for? Executive blogs obviously have something to do with a company’s image and expert blogs will often be concerned with products, but it is still possible to single out PR (image) and marketing (products) professionals here, because, unlike executives and subject-matter experts, their job is not to place themselves or their expertise at the center of attention in the blog, but instead either the company as such or its products. They remain largely invisible in the communication process, something that is underscored by the fact that many product blogs do not provide authorship information.
A. Expert Blogs
written by: subject-matter experts, such as software developers, engineers, scientists, finance and legal experts etc
target audience: other experts at the same company or in the same industry, executives, existing customers
purposes: a) to inform, b) to seek information and advice from others and, c) as as a mnenomic instrument for the author
B. Executive Blogs
written by: company leaders and management
target audience: business partners, potential and existing customers, shareholders, company employees, [press, competitors, general public]
purposes: very diverse; include a) to explain and clarify management strategy, b) to build trust in the company, c) to promote the company’s products, d) to criticize competitors and their products and e) to react to criticism from competitors, customers, the press etc.
C. Product Blogs
written (or edited) by: marketing specialists
target audience: potential and existing customers
purpose: a) to promote a product directly, b) to generate a discussion centered on the product, c) to address issues not identical with but closely related to the company’s products
D. Image Blogs
written (or edited) by: public-relations specialists
target audience: potential and existing customers, general public
purpose: a) to create a positive public perception of the company, b) to actively shape the public discussion of the company and its products and c) to address specific criticism from customers
In my next post, I will take a closer look at the individual categories, provide examples of typical members and outline the model’s limits.
