Corporate blogging

Today I'm down in London (30 something degrees of heat - phew!) for a SCONUL Working Group on Information Literacy meeting. More of that anon - I'm just using a computer in the SCONUL office to post this blog entry that I prepared earlier. Came across this paper (n.b. not free) - it's not an indepth study, being based on observation of blogs on a sample of Fortune 500 companies, but it does propose a typology for corporate blogs (Bottom-up, and then variations on Top-down) and provide some examples.

Lee, S. and Hwang, T (2006) "Corporate blogging strategies of the Fortune 500 companies." Management Decision, 44 ( 3), 316 - 334.

It's helpful in thinking about why companies encourage blogging, and also therefore the extent to which the blogs are conveying a particular perspective on the company. In the respect, of course, it's like any type of company information produced by the company concerned: it can be very valuable in giving factual detail you wouldn't get elsewhere, and in giving an idea of the how the company wants to be perceived, but you need to keep a critical perspective...

Photo by Sheila Webber: Sydney from Watson's bay at dusk (or: Sydney, to look like Venice)