Purpose – The aim of this paper is to address and discuss usage and implications of a weblog in a corporate communication context from an employees' perspective. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a case study of a government agency's corporate blogging activity, traced through focus group interviews with the organizational bloggers and analyzed using situational analysis and thematic network analysis. Findings – The study problematizes the predominant focus on the promises of interactivity and dialogue as a repeated positive motivation for corporate bloggers by shedding a light on blogging as experienced from inside an organization. The study shows that employee bloggers use the blog platform in a varied way and do not agree internally on the appropriate corporate blog usage. Four main positions that encapsulate the variation in blog usage – the official, the debater, the engineer and the passionate blogger – are identified, and the implications (opportunities and barriers) of blogging for the blogging employees' behavior and motivation are unfolded and discussed. Practical implications – The findings are useful for managers to get insight into the challenges, barriers and opportunities, which employees experience when acting as bloggers on behalf of an organization, as well as when acting on other transparent Web 2.0 mediated communications platforms for corporate purposes. The findings also indicate and give recommendations to the internal resources required to support the employees when letting them out into the blogosphere. Originality/value – The paper provides a documented, nuanced and deep insight and understanding into blog usage in a corporate context from the perspective of the employee bloggers. This insight is as critical to our understanding of blogging and social media in a corporate context, as it is to our understanding of transparent and participatory organizational culture.

No abstract

The purpose of this article is to show and discuss how corporate social media usage is driven by people, not technology, and how the creation of a culture of participation on the part of a company, in this case the world’s largest container shipping company with 25,000 employees worldwide, Maersk Line (www.maerskline.com), requires a systematic, user-driven listen-and-learn strategy with a clear selection of purpose and social platform according to audience and topics. This effort needs to be continuously dedicated and aligned, focusing on which relationships the company wants to form.

This article looks at organizational blogger roles and how they both reflect and affect the way knowledge is communicated across department boundaries in a corporate blogging context. The blog is approached from a sociotechnical perspective, addressing and looking into the various roles in a community of practice and the enactment of the bloggers in a transparent context. Empirical examples of discourses at work in an organizational blog are highlighted, and the diverging roles and dilemmas of the blogging employees are discussed. People within the same organization have different goals in relation to the same technology, and the content of the blog and the blog comments are managed differently by the internal bloggers which feel empowered or disempowered. The article pinpoints roles of enactment in a socio-technical perspective through pointing out conflicting goals, roles and the resulting counter discourses and shows examples of how the group of bloggers with the shared narrative tradition is able to mobilize its members and create subgroups for appropriate blog behaviors and changing behavior.