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). IntroductionWeb logs, or blogs, offer a unique channel for developing and maintaining relationships between organizations and publics. The purpose of this study is to triangulate professional literature on online communication, scholarship on relational maintenance strategies and relational outcomes, and quantitative data to explore the potential of blogs as tools for public relations.The centrality of relationships in building public relations theory is clearly apparent in recent scholarly literature, and this interest is not limited to the ivory tower. Public relations professionals also have taken interest in relationships as the foundation for their work and have sought ways to measure their contributions as such.

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The proposed model of public response to marketplace advocacy accounted for approximately 80% of variance in attitude toward a campaign promoting the coal industry. Marketplace advocacy is used by corporate interests to generate support for risk-related products, and the findings indicate trust in the message sponsor and perceptions of industry accountability are key to lay audiences' negotiation of these messages. Perceptions of trust and accountability led to favorable persuasion coping outcomes for the sponsor—identification with positive message themes and favorable evaluation of the information in the message—which in turn led to positive attitudes toward the campaign.