International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

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March 26-28, 2007

Building Trust with Corporate Blogs

Monday, March 26, 2007

Paul Dwyer

The personal relationships that companies once had with customers degenerated into the cold automaticity of datagathering with the widespread adoption of management information systems. By restoring a human face to a company’s self-presentation, blogging has been heralded as a paradigm shift in the way companies interact with customers. This study tests a model relating the content of an author's blog posts to readers' responses. It suggests that companies can use blogging to complement customer relationship management processes to the extent their customers exhibit an organic desire to commune by combining provocative informational content with expressions of benevolent intent. Such consumers respond well to these overtures, showing evidence of increased subject-matter involvement, liking and trust. The study also proposes a way to measure diversity of thought in reader comments to guard against being unduly swayed by a vocal minority.

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posted by ICWSM at 9:58 AM  

1 Comments:

Douglas said...

One of the interesting things about corporate blogging is that having an open conversation with customers is interpreted in the business community as a sign of difficulty or desperation on the part of a company. Paul gave the GM FastLane blog as an instance of a corporate blog that doesn't stink. It would be interesting to apply Paul's "cultural tribalism" metric to well-known blogs in the blogosphere. I wrote about Paul's talk here.

8:25 AM  

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