Update on Corporate Blogging Study

Just wanted to provide a quick update on our corporate blogging study. The students have conducted all 20 interviews (thanks to all the corporate bloggers who participated -- we'll be following up with a more personal thank you in the near future) and transcribed at least one of them.

We began our initial thematic analysis of the interviews as a class, and then John Cass and I will be going through in more detail.

Students also wrote a reflection essay critiquing their own interview skills and commenting on what they felt the three most important themes were. Now that classes have ended I am in the process of reading and grading their essays.

We'll post additional updates as we go along!

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corporate blogging interviewing

Blog as branding tool

I was reading Janet Johnson's blog over at Marqui and she spoke about "You as a Brand". I was thinking about it and wouldn't that just fit perfectly into the blog? I want to take it a step further than Janet did and suggest that big corporations that rely heavily on branding must focus extensively on the language they use in their blogs. Extreme examples always demonstrate things easiest. When you think about it, we've spoken about this in class several times. Blogs for companies like Adobe and Microsoft most likely rely on complicated, technological language because this reflects their brand as a leading technology company. A company like Starbucks would use coffee related vocabulary integrated into the individual's blog. Companies like Nike and Reebok whose brand focuses on an athletic lifestyle would utilize fun, easy going vocabulary.


Maybe what we should have asked the corporate bloggers is how they utilize language to reflect the brand of their company. Because its easy to see in these examples I've suggested, it'd be much more interesting to see how it plays out in average companies. In my interview, Janet mentioned that corporate blogs inevitably become more personalized as the writer becomes more comfortable writing. We debated this in class, but perhaps what's not in such contention is whether the language eventually aligns with the company brand. What do you all think?