Organizations face unique challenges in communicating interactively online with publics that comprise dauntingly large numbers of individuals. This online survey examined the perceptions of people who had experienced interactive communication with a large consumer-tech-industry company via organizational blogs. Those reporting the greatest exposure to the blogs in this study were more likely to perceive the organization as communicating with a conversational voice. Conversational human voice and communicated relational commitment (relational maintenance strategies) correlated positively with trust, satisfaction, commitment, and control mutuality (relational outcomes). Building on prior research, this survey supports a model of distributed public relations-one in which key outcomes of public relations are fostered by a wide range of people communicating interactively while representing an organization.Public relations scholars have heralded the Internet for its potential as a tool for dialogue and two-way communication. If public relations is about mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and publics, then the Internet holds tremendous promise for improving the communication that is an essential part of developing and sustaining such relationships when organizations and publics both have access to online media (Wright, 1998(Wright, , 2001. As Internet technologies emerged on the horizons of public relations scholarship in the 1990s and early 2000s many theorists and researchers were turning their attention to relational outcomes as important goals for public relations work, emphasizing the role of organizational and public behaviors while acknowledging the importance of communication in building and maintaining organization-public relationships (Ledingham, 2003).Many early studies of the Internet and public relations focused on the way large, for-profit companies were using the Web by analyzing the content of their Web

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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