Organizational Climate and Blog Policy

Blogger or not, please take a moment for one of my surveys. The links are in the left sidebar.
Mahalo!

Uses of Blogs

Coming soon -- my review of Axel Bruns & Joanne Jacobs (2006) Uses of Blogs book at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (http://rccs.usfca.edu/). I recommend it as a good overview of blogging from mainly academic perspectives.

Interaction and Trust

Why blog in a company? My hypothesis: Builds trust. Similar idea at


http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/rawn?entry=from_communities_to_encouraging_innovation

Edelman Trust Index 2007

Edelman Trust Index Due Out this Week
Was scheduled for last week. Edelman is a great site for PR and employee communication issues. It appears that they attract customers by sharing their research, demonstrating their competence. Mahalo!

In Blogs We Trust: Research

See the Dec. 2006 Edelman(.com) study of internal communications -- "New Frontiers . . . " Very interesting data on internal blogs and wiki's.
Today (Jan. 20) at the open source conference at UH I had the opportunity to talk with a Sun employee who started blogging recently. (Mahalo, Sun, for the lunch and Barton George's talk!) Sun is of course famous for its CEO blogger. Blogging definitely gives peers and managers insights into what employees are thinking. Sun bloggers can choose to have their blogs internally or externally visible.

Blogs Underutilized by Schools?

I hypothesize that schools and parents underutilize blogs as tools for parental & community involvement. This is based on a small sample involving public high schools on Oahu. Anybody know of any stories, good or bad?

Naked conversations build trust

My copy of Naked Conversations arrived recently in Hawaii by boat. I 'm almost done. Great book! It is encouraging that my hypotheses about how blogs build trust are pretty consistent with the claims of Scoble & Israel. In the best academic tradition, I suspect that fleshing out the details proving some of the relationships will be a little more complicated. But then that's why we do research! Trust is simple a first glance but quite complicated below the surface.
Similarly I see culture and trust as having an intervening construct called climate. Organizational climate in social science speak.
Bring the book tour to Hawaii!

Blogging gives your firm a "conversational human voice"

See Tom Kelleher's paper just published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication at

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/kelleher.html


Abstract
This study develops and tests operational definitions of relational maintenance strategies appropriate to online public relations. An experiment was designed to test the new measures and to test hypotheses evaluating potential advantages of organizational blogs over traditional Web sites. Participants assigned to the blog condition perceived an organization's "conversational human voice" to be greater than participants who were assigned to read traditional Web pages. Moreover, perceived relational strategies (conversational human voice, communicated relational commitment) were found to correlate significantly with relational outcomes (trust, satisfaction, control mutuality, commitment).

Why we blog

See this interesting survey of why people blog.

http://media.timewarner.com/media/newmedia/cb_press_view.cfm?release_num=55254441

Research Proposal -- Comments

I plan to do a careful study of organizational blogging policies, both internal and external.
Overall hypothesis: Blogging can create a virtuous circle of trust and employee involvement when there is a favorable organizational climate.

See http://www2.hawaii.edu/~smithdan/blogs&trust/blogpage1.html

Comments welcome here or at smithdan@hawaii.edu