Management blogs exert influence over employee blogs, research shows

I read an interesting journal article recently about the corporate blogging strategies of theFortune 5000 companies in the US.

The research, conducted by a team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was carried out in January 2006 so is a bit out-of-date, but there was a particularly intersting finding that I thought I would share.

The researchers looked at corporate blogs in Fortune 500 firms that had blogs and devised five typologies based on the blog's authorship and its use within the company.

In a nutshell these five groups were (quoting the article):

• Employee blog – An employee blog is a typical personal blog that is maintained by a single rank-and-file employee. For example, all employee blogs of Sun Microsystems can be found on a public blog aggregator, Planet Sun, which collects Sun employee blog entries.
• Group blog – While a typical employee blog is operated by one person, a group blog, also called a collaborative blog, is written by several people.
• Executive blog – People have become more interested in top executives who run companies than in individual companies.
• Promotional blog – The purpose of the promotional blog is to generate buzz about products and events. This type of blog is somewhat controversial among bloggers at large, primarily due to the lack of an authentic human voice.
• Newsletter blog – Aside from typical personal blogs, some organisations have launched a newsletter type of blog that officially represents their positions. Thus, this type of blog tends to be filled with well-polished messages. Examples are Yahoo! Search Blog, Google Blog and Red Hat Magazine.

These five typologies are then further sub-divided into organisational strategies of 'top-down' or 'bottom-up' blogging.

For simplicities' sake, employee blogs are bottom-up and all the rest are top-down.

The study found that the majority of companies that used corporate blogs had top-down strategies in an attempt to control the blogging agenda and manage the presentation of information.

Only two firms - Microsoft and Sun - let their employees blog openly about the firm.

The researchers cited the reason for this being a persisting fear of giving employees autonomy and an ability to speak openly and honestly about their employer.

However, what was really interesting was the finding that where companies had top management or 'executives' blogging (ie. Scoble at Micosoft (as was) and Jonathan Schwartz at Sun) as well as employees blogging, employees tended to follow the agenda set by their bosses.

The study says:

"We found that only two companies, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, are using a bottom-up blogging strategy. These firms seek to maximise the capabilities of blogs by supporting employees who are highly productive and efficient. However, this approach might negatively affect companies because high levels of autonomy among self-directed employees can become a liability (Langfred, 2004). To be truly successful, such employees also require control mechanisms such as “external leadership” (Druskat and Wheeler, 2004) and “concertive control” (Barker, 1993). Interestingly, two bottom-up blogging companies do have leading bloggers who act as control mechanisms – Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems as an “external leader” and Robert Scoble of Microsoft as a “concertive control” person."

What this means to me is that the utter terror of companies letting their employees blog openly about the firm are unecessary.

Don't just set-up a blog for the CEO, show your commitment to the entire business. Give the employees a voice as well as the CEO or other management.

The full article should be available here as a pdf.

Technorati tags: Fortune 500; Microsoft; Sun Microsystems; research; University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Comments

[Sam Wilcox]

This study makes for an interesting read Simon. It was only last year I was sat in a classroom learning about models of communication via newsletter or, for the larger companies, e-mail/Intranet.

It just shows how much social media is affecting the business world. Can you see employess downloading meetings as podcasts? Or am I behind the times and this already happens?!

[Simon Collister]

If you look to the right busiensses social media tools are already making a difference. I spoke to the deputy CEO at the National Consumer Council last summer and he told me that the UK Food Standards Agency release their board meetings as a podcast. Instead of finding time to trawl through a huge document he now listens to the meeting on his ipod on the way to work.