Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia D
IPARTIMENTO DI STUDI LINGUISTICI E CULTURALICorso di Laurea Magistrale in
L ANGUAGES FOR COMMUNICATION IN INTERNATIONAL ENTERPRISES AND ORGANIZATIONS
Metadiscourse in corporate blogging practices:
uncovering ethos and pathos.
Il metadiscorso nei corporate blogs:
analisi di ethos e pathos.
Prova finale di:
Andrea Corradini
Relatore:
Franca Poppi
Correlatore Giuliana Diani
Anno Accademico 2017/2018
Abstract
Nowadays, organizations have to be well aware of the communication possibilities offered by the World Wide Web. In an ever Internet-connected world, one way companies keep in touch with customers is by using the so-called Social Media platforms.
Among them, corporate blogs have sprung up since the end of the nineties as valuable digital tools for marketing and public relations. Within this perspective, modern corporate bloggers have to engage with their audience and involve them while presenting themselves as trustworthy figures and promoting their company’s products, services, events and
opportunities.
In order to reach these multifaceted purposes, corporate bloggers carefully craft their posts recurring to metadiscourse, a fundamental linguistic resource which allows them not only to organize their ideas, but also to relate themselves to their readers.
Thanks to a well-crafted use of metadiscourse, they enrich their texts with particular language features with the twofold aim of producing a coherent, user-friendly and context- related discourse, and of expressing their personality, credibility, attention to their public and attitude to the message conveyed.
The present work discusses the role of metadiscourse in corporate blogging practice, and in particular it aims to uncover metadiscourse text-level items which could convey the two classic rhetoric means of ethos (credibility) and pathos (emotion).
Since ancient times, rhetoric has been characterised by a special focus on persuasion.
Indeed, rooted in philosophy, and the educational and political system of the ancient Greek, rhetoric is primarily a voluntary form of persuasive communication and also an inevitable part of everyday communication and interaction (Higgins and Walker, 2012). As a confirmation of that, Burke states that “Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is meaning, there is persuasion” (1969: 72).
This dissertation carries out an analysis of how corporate bloggers reach their aims by permeating their text with an aura of persuasiveness. This aura is constructed thanks to an attentive use of metadiscourse items that convey ethos (credibility) and pathos (emotion). The final outcome of this small-scale case study will shed light on how corporate blogging
practice employs rhetoric, demonstrating whether and to what extent corporate bloggers use persuasiveness when blogging in order to reach their aims.
Riassunto
Al giorno d’oggi, le imprese sono più che consapevoli dei molteplici modi di
comunicare permessi dal World Wide Web. In un mondo sempre più connesso ad Internet, uno dei mezzi che le aziende impiegano per tenersi in contatto coi propri clienti sono le piattaforme Social Media.
Tra di esse, i corporate blog (in italiano blog aziendali) sono emersi dalla fine degli anni novanta come validi strumenti digitali di marketing e pubbliche relazioni. In questo contesto, i corporate bloggers odierni devono allacciare contatti col proprio pubblico e coinvolgerlo mentre si presentano come figure degne di fiducia e nel contempo promuovono prodotti, servizi, eventi ed opportunità della loro azienda.
Per raggiungere questi obiettivi, i corporate bloggers elaborano con attenzione i propri post facendo uso del metadiscorso, una risorsa linguistica fondamentale che permette loro non solo di organizzare le proprie idee, ma anche di relazionarsi coi loro lettori.
Grazie a un sapiente impiego del metadiscorso, i corporate bloggers arricchiscono i loro testi con particolari accorgimenti linguistici che hanno come primo obiettivo quello di
produrre un testo coerente, facile da leggere e legato al contesto, e come secondo obiettivo quello di esprimere la loro personalità, credibilità, attenzione verso il pubblico e relazione col messaggio espresso.
La presente tesi discute il ruolo del metadiscorso nell’ambito del corporate blogging, e in particolare punta a scoprire gli elementi testuali del metadiscorso che possano esprimere i due componenti della retorica classica di ethos (credibilità) e pathos (emozione).
Sin dall’antichità, la retorica si è distinta per le sue caratteristiche persuasive. Difatti, radicata nella filosofia, educazione e sistema politico degli antichi greci, la retorica è prima di tutto una forma comunicativa volontaria di persuasione e pertanto una parte inevitabile della comunicazione e interazione di tutti i giorni (Higgins e Walker, 2012). A confermare ciò, Burke afferma che “Ovunque ci sia persuasione, c’è retorica. E ovunque c’è significato, c’è persuasione” (1969: 72).
Questa tesi mostra un’analisi di come i corporate bloggers raggiungano i loro obiettivi permeando i loro testi con un’aura di persuasione. Quest’aura è costruita grazie a un attento utilizzo di risorse metadiscorsive che esprimono ethos (credibilità) e pathos (emozione). Il risultato finale di questa ricerca farà luce su come le pratiche di corporate blogging
impieghino la retorica, dimostrando se e quanto i corporate bloggers usino la persuasione per raggiungere i loro obiettivi.
Zusammenfassung
Heutzutage sollten sich die Unternehmen über die Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten des World Wide Web sehr bewusst sein. Die Verwendung von Social Media Platformen ist eine Weise, damit die Unternehmen in dieser immer stärker ans Internet gebundene Welt mit ihren Kunden kommunizieren können.
Unter ihnen haben sich seit der Ende der neunziger Jahre Corporate Blogs als wirksames Digitalmittel für Marketing und Public Relations erwiesen. Durch diesen Zusammenhang müssen moderne Corporate Bloggers mit ihrem Publikum zusammenwirken und es gleichsam involvieren. Gleichzeitig müssen sich Corporate Bloggers als zuverlässig zeigen und die Produkte des Unternehmens, Dienstleistungen, Aktionen und andere Kaufgelegenheit vermarkten.
Um dies zu erreichen, erstellen Corporate Bloggers ihre Posts sehr aufmerksam unter der Aufwendung von Metadiscoursen. Unter Metadiscoursen versteht man ein linguistisches Instrument, das ihnen nicht nur bei der Planung ihrer Idee hilft, sondern auch eine Beziehung zu den Lesern schafft.
Mit der richtigen Anwendung von Metadiscoursen können Corporate Bloggers ihre Texte anreichern, mit dem Hauptziel einen kohärenten, leserfreundlichen und
kontextorientierten Text zu verfassen. Corporate Bloggers können dadurch auch ihre
Persönlichkeit, Glaubwürdigkeit, ihre Zuwendung zum Leser und ihre Beziehung zum Thema ausdrücken.
Diese Arbeit behandelt die Rolle von Metadiscoursen in der Corporate Blogging Praxis und konzentriert sich besonders auf Text-Niveau Elemente in Metadiscoursen, die die zwei klassischen rhetorischen Mittel von Ethos (Glaubwürdigkeit) und Pathos (Gefühl) ausdrücken können.
Von jeher wurde die Rhetorik mit Überzeugung assoziiert. Allerdings hat Rhetorik seine Wurzeln in der Philosophie, Bildung und Politik der alten Griechen. Rhetorik ist
hauptsächlich eine freiwillige Art der Überzeugung und auch ein unvermeidbarer Teil der alltäglichen Kommunikation und Interaktion. Wie Burke herausstelte: “Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is meaning, there is persuasion” (1969: 72).
Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit einer Analyse, die erklärt, wie Corporate Bloggers ihre Zwecke erreichen. Sie verleihen ihren Texten mit eine Aura der Überzeugung. Diese Aura besteht aus einer aufmerksamen Anwendung der Elemente des Metadiscourses, die Ethos (Glaubwürdigkeit) und Pathos (Gefühl) ausdrücken. Das Endergebnis soll erläutern, wie
Corporate Blogging Rhetorik in der Praxis benutzt. Es wird auch gezeigt, ob und in welchem Maße Corporate Bloggers Überzeugung beim bloggen.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ... 1
Chapter 1. Social Media ... 2
1.1 - What are Social Media? ... 2
1.2 - Social Media: Web and Internet addiction ... 3
1.3 - Social Media: User-Generated Content in Web 2.0 environment ... 5
1.4 - Social Media: profile, connect, go! ... 8
1.5 - Social Media: an overview ... 8
1.6 - Corporate identity and Social Media ... 14
1.7 - Social Media effects on corporate identity ... 18
Chapter 2. Blogs ... 23
2.1 - Blogs’ history ... 23
2.2 - What is a blog? ... 29
2.3 - Blogs: technical characteristics ... 31
2.4 - Blogging motivations ... 32
2.5 - Blogs: a new genre? ... 34
Chapter 3. Corporate blogs ... 40
3.1 - What is a corporate blog? ... 40
3.2 - Corporate blogs: technical characteristics ... 41
3.3 - Corporate blogs classification models ... 43
3.4 - Corporate blogging: marketing implications... 49
3.4.1 - Corporate blogs as e-CRM and engagement building tools ... 51
3.4.2 - Corporate blogs as consumer trust and involvement building tools ... 53
3.4.3 - Corporate blogs as humanizing business tools ... 56
3.5 - Corporate blogs: advantages and opportunities ... 58
3.6 - Corporate blogs: disadvantages and drawbacks ... 60
Chapter 4. Analysis theoretical foundations ... 62
4.1 – Introduction to the analysis ... 62
4.2 - The metadiscourse concept ... 63
4.3 - Metadiscourse and rhetoric ... 64
4.4 - The metadiscourse model by Hyland (1998) ... 65
4.5 - The metadiscourse model by Hyland (2005) ... 67
Chapter 5. Analysis of corporate blogs ... 77
5.1 - Objectives ... 77
5.2 - Materials ... 77
5.3 - Methods ... 79
5.4 - Overall results ... 80
5.5 - Realizing blog’s credibility: establishing an ethos ... 81
5.5.1 - Boosters ... 82
5.5.2 - Hedges ... 83
5.5.3 - Self-mentions ... 85
5.6 - Realizing blog’s affective appealing: creating pathos ... 86
5.6.1 - Attitude markers ... 87
5.6.2 - Engagement markers ... 88
5.6.3 - Self-mentions ... 93
5.7 - Discussion on findings ... 94
Chapter 6. Conclusions ... 96
References ... 101
Appendix 1. ... 114
Appendix 2. ... 117
Attitude markers ... 117
Boosters ... 118
Engagement markers ... 120
Hedges ... 121
Self-mentions ... 123
1
Introduction
The purpose of the present work is to analyse selected corporate blogs’ contents from a linguistic perspective, with special attention to their metadiscourse features. Metadiscourse involves those linguistic elements fundamental in order both to guide readers through the text, and to involve them into the argument. In particular, this small-scale case study will examine metadiscourse text-level features that could convey persuasiveness, especially focusing on the two classical rhetoric means of ethos (credibility) and pathos (emotion).
The first chapter opens with a detailed overview of the framework within which corporate blogs are placed, namely the Social Media environment.
Subsequently, chapter two describes blogs, exploring also the main motivations driving people to blog and a possible contextualization of blogs as a genre.
Then, the third chapter examines more in detail corporate blogs. After explaining what they are, their principal characteristics and classification models, particular attention has been devoted to display the two main areas in which corporate blogs are exploited by firms, namely marketing and public relationships maintenance.
In the fourth chapter the theoretical foundations of the analysis are showed. In particular, the present work draws from metadiscourse studies by Ken Hyland (1998, 2004, 2005).
Firstly, the metadiscourse concept and its links with rhetoric and persuasiveness are
discussed. Then, two models by Hyland for the classification of textual metadiscourse items in written texts are displayed and explained (1998, 2004).
Chapter five is dedicated to the analysis. After a brief overview of objective, materials and methods, the analysis will proceed to analysing instances of metadiscourse in corporate blogs’ content, looking for traces of persuasiveness.
The aim of the present dissertation is to demonstrate if and how rhetoric shows itself in the corporate blogging practice. This objective has been investigated through the analysis of surface-level metadiscourse items in a number of selected corporate blogs’ texts. In particular, this analysis will explore how persuasiveness in corporate blogging practice is shaped mainly by the two classical rhetoric means of ethos (credibility) and pathos (emotion). Thus, this small-scale case study will attempt to unveil whether and to what extent corporate blogs are to be considered as rhetorical creations.
2
Chapter 1. Social Media
1.1 - What are Social Media?
The present work focuses its analysis on corporate blogs. Corporate blogs are one of the many Web 2.0 applications which can be used by an organization to reach its goals. An organization may opt for a blog as a corporate communication tool to interact with its customers. Corporate blogs are simply an evolution in the business arena of the previous digital precursors, namely blogs. Both corporate blogs and blogs are commonly referred to, together with many other means of communication, as Social Media.
A comprehensive Social Media definition is given by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010).
According to them, Social Media are “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and
exchange of User Generated Content” (2010: 61). In the same way, Cooper writes on the Salem Press Encyclopedia that Social Media are “Internet-based applications and websites that promote the sharing of user-generated content, communication, and participation on a large scale” (Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2013: 4).
Nevertheless, Obar and Wildman (2015) acknowledge the difficulty in defining what exactly Social Media are, since there is a massive amount of built-in and stand-alone social media products and services, and this can be confusing. In addition to that, it seems that the term “social media” is used by some scholar interchangeably with the term “social network”.
Furthermore, they list two main problems associated with the definition of Social Media technologies. Firstly, the speed by which technology expands and evolves, with PC and mobile-based platforms continually developed, launched, abandoned, re-shaped, transformed.
Secondly, if it is true that social media services facilitate communicating, collaborating and meeting within people, it is also true that even other communication devices perform the same function, just like, for example, the telephone, the fax, the e-mail. In the following page, table 1 illustrates the main Social Media services by active user accounts.
3 Table 1. Leading Social Media services worldwide by active user accounts. (Obar and
Wildman, 2015: 746)
In order to provide a broader picture, Obar and Wildman (2015) synthetize the main common characteristics of the current social media services into four main features:
1) Social media services are Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
2) Social media are made of content created by users.
3) Individuals and groups are allowed by social media services to create their own profile in the website or application owned by a social media.
4) Social media services enables and ease the creation of social networks online through connecting one another different profiles of individuals/groups.
The following sections are devoted to explaining more in detail and broadening the four aforementioned main characteristics of Social Media.
1.2 - Social Media: Web and Internet addiction
The first peculiarity of Social Media refers to them as Web and Internet based applications.
We are undoubtedly used to hearing, reading and using almost everywhere and everyday
4 the words “Web”, “Internet” and “application”. In fact, the digital environment where Social Media were born encompasses above all both Internet and the World Wide Web (commonly referred to as Web). Even if these two words are related, they are not the same thing.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community led by its members, its staff and the public. They operate together to develop Web standards, that are essential elements which makes the Web working. This community is guided by Web inventor and Director Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe. The mission of W3C is to develop, improve and enhance Web, ensuring its long-term growth. W3C website1 draws first on Wikipedia for the definition of the Internet: “The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that interchange data by packet switching using the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP)” and subsequently clarifies that the Internet is “a network of
networks”.
The W3C website also explains what the World Wide Web is, drawing on its own Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume I2 :
The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform
Resource Identifiers (URI). Thus, the Web is an information space. The first three specifications for Web technologies defined URLs3, HTTP4, and HTML5.
It can be stated then, that the Internet is the environment of interconnected networks that allows also the existence of the Web, this being an information space which in turn allows websites to exist. Indeed, as Aghaei et al. confirm,
The World Wide Web (commonly known as the web) is not synonymous with the internet but is the most prominent part of the internet that can be defined as a techno-social system to
1 https://www.w3.org/Help/#activity.
2 https://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
3 Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs, aka URLs, Uniform Resource Locators) are Web naming/addressing technologies. They are short strings that identify resources in the web: documents, images, downloadable files, services, electronic mailboxes, and other resources. Source: https://www.w3.org/Addressing/#background
4 The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP has been in use by the World Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. It is basically a request/response protocol. A client sends a request to the server, which responds.
Source: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616
5 The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the publishing language of the World Wide Web. It is used to create Web pages. Indeed, Web pages all over the world consist of HTML. Source:
https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/HTML/Training/What_is_HTML%3F
5 interact humans based on technological networks (Aghaei et al. 2012: 1).
This last definition suggests that the technological networks are the Internet network connections, whereas the Web is clearly defined as a system that is part of the Internet.
Concluding this brief overview, Social Media were born within the framework of Internet and the World Wide Web, the former being a global system of interconnected computer networks, the latter defined as an information space and techno-social system that allows interactions between humans within the Internet.
1.3 - Social Media: User-Generated Content in Web 2.0 environment
The second characteristic of Social Media, peculiarity of the Web 2.0 stage, is that they can be created by users. I will now define what Web 2.0 is and how the User-Generated Content concept is intertwined with it.
Since the end of the 80s, the system known as Web has developed in three principal phases. Web 1.0 (1989-2003) developed in year 1989 thanks to Tim Berners Lee, who is considered its inventor. This primitive form of Web was a static one, since it was a read-only modality. In the Web 1.0, only businesses could submit catalogs or brochures of their product to the audience, which could just read those contents with no further interactions: an
exemplification of one-way kind of communication (Aghaei et al. 2012: 2).
The subsequent Web 2.0 (2004-2010) was defined in a conference brainstorming session between Tim O’Reilly and Media Live International in year 2004. According to O’Reilly (2007) Web 2.0 can be defined as follows:
Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform:
delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences6.
6 https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4578/
6 The fundamental novelty of the Web 2.0 is the participation of the users: from the read- only limited interaction of Web 1.0, the Web 2.0 allows interactivity. Web 2.0 has been defined as a people-centric, read and write, bi-directional communication model. Indeed, as Constantinides and Fountain stress,
The user is a vital factor for all categories of Web 2.0 applications, not only as a consumer but mainly as a content contributor. The term User-Generated Content (UGC) is often used to underline this special attribute of all the above Web 2.0 application categories (2008: 233).
Web 2.0 allowed every user to create and publish information on the Internet, contributing with comments, pictures, articles, audio and video (Palonska and Pobrȩska, 2016). The main technologies and services implemented by Web 2.0 are blogs7, microblogs8 really simple syndication9 (RSS), wikis10, mashups11, semantic search engines12, podcasts and videocasts13, internet games14. Table 2 summarizes the main differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
7 Blogs are websites which contents are posted by users in reverse chronological order (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). More details about them will be provided in chapter 2.
8 Microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller (Aichner and Jacob, 2015).
9 RSS syndicates content from blogs or web pages (Aghaei et al. 2012). Specifically, RSS is a Web feed that may, for example, keep track of different websites by putting them together in a unique news aggregator. This news aggregator will check the RSS feed to see if there are new updates in the websites of interest, and this new content will be transferred (this transfer is known as web syndication) from a website to another or to a website to the user.
10 Wikis are webpage/s that can be edited by anyone who has access to it (Aghaei et al. 2012).
11 Mashups are websites or webpages that combines information and services from multiple sources on the web (Aghaei et al. 2012).
12 Li et al. state that “semantic search uses semantics to make search systems more effective. More specifically, semantic search approaches extract semantic meanings and structures from search queries and documents and exploits them in search process” (2016: 2).
13 A podcast is “a digital audio file made available on the Internet for downloading to a computer or mobile device, typically available as a series, new instalments of which can be received by subscribers automatically”.
Videocasts differ from podcasts in the fact that they are not just audio but also video files. Source: Oxford English Dictionary Online (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/)
14 Internet games are video games played usually through the Internet. Oxford dictionary online defines an online game as: “a video game which is or can be played over a computer network (now usually the Internet)”.
Source: Oxford English Dictionary Online (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com).
7 Table 2. Comparison between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. (Aghaei et al., 2012: 3)
Web 3.0 (2011-to present) is a term suggested in 2006 by John Markoff of the New York Times to define the third generation of Web affordances (Spivak, 2011). The core concept underlying Web 3.0, also known as Semantic Web, according to Aghaei et al. is to
define structure data and link them in order to more effective discovery, automation, integration, and reuse across various applications. Web 3.0 tries to link, integrate, and analyze data from various data sets to obtain new information stream; It is able to improve data management, support accessibility of mobile internet, simulate creativity and innovation, encourage factor of globalization phenomena, enhance customers’ satisfaction and help to organize collaboration in social web (2012: 5).
Web 3.0 is characterized also by mobile service accessibility, cloud computing and real time IT (Internet Technology) systems (Palonka and Pobrȩska, 2016). The principal difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 is that the former bases itself on user-generated content, whereas the latter targets data sets.
A fourth phase of Web is also mentioned in recent literature. Web 4.0 is an early- emerging and ongoing topic of research interest. The basic assumption of Web 4.0 is the symbiosis between humans and machines, envisaging a shift to artificial intelligences in order to make the Web intelligent (Aghaei et al. 2012).
8 Summarizing, Social Media were born in the Web 2.0 environment, whose fundamental feature is to allow users to create their own content and to put it on the Web freely. The creation of content by the user is referred to as UGC (User-Generated-Content).
1.4 - Social Media: profile, connect, go!
The last two peculiarities of Social Media are strictly related. Firstly, users can create their user-specific profiles within the social media. Secondly, a Social Media service can connect a profile to other profiles of individuals and groups, facilitating the development of social networks.
The user profile serves as the backbone of the Social Media (Boyd and Ellison, 2007), because it allows the connection between user accounts. Profiling options may vary according to which social service is employed, but commonly the features are submitting a username, providing contact information and uploading a picture. Searching for and connecting with others would be impossible without profiling information. Not to mention that many networks function with liking, up-voting, score comparison, sharing: all features that wouldn’t be possible without information about users (Obar and Wildman, 2015).
Connecting users’ profiles to one another is the basis for creating a social network. A social network online is easily created when you set up a list of users you want to connect with. Those listed connections’ nature and nomenclature vary from site to site (Boyd and Ellison, 2008). For example, Facebook and Snapchat call them “friends”, Twitter and Instagram “follows”, Linkedin “connections”. As soon as a list of network connections is established, users are able to review, access and modify that social network by engaging with a list of those actively organized users. Content consumption (such as accessing and sharing links) and interactions (such as “liking” or commenting on something) is often associated with the creation of these traditional lists (Obar and Wildman, 2015).
1.5 - Social Media: an overview
Until now it has been explained that Social Media are Internet-based applications, with their foundation in the Web 2.0 technologies. Among the main features of Social Media we pointed out that they allow users to create their own content (User-Generated content), they
9 request for information about users (profiling) and they facilitate the creation of social
networks by connecting users profiles one another. It is clear now that a social media has not to be necessarily identified with a social network, and consequently the interchangeability of the two terms is mistaking. Certainly is, that social networking sites are a popular and perhaps the most well-known type of social media (Devereux et al. 2017). As Aichner and Jacob explain, social media are not limited to social networks (e.g. Facebook), but they include blogs, business networks, collaborative projects, enterprise social networks, forums, microblogs, photo sharing, product/services reviews, social bookmarking, social gaming, video sharing and virtual worlds. (Aichner and Jacob, 2015). In the following lines, a general and brief description of the above listed social media adapted from Aichner and Jacob (2015:
259-260) will be given.
- Blogs. A blog (from 'web' and 'log') is a chronological list of postings, which can be read and commented upon by visitors. Blogs are run by both individuals and
companies (the latter are called business or corporate blogs), which post news or other informational material, such as product tests. Examples of blogs are the Huffington Post and Boing Boing.
- Business networks. Individuals use business networks to establish and maintain professional contacts. Registered users create a personal profile and share personal details such as the type and duration of their education, professional experience and expert knowledge. Companies use professional networks primarily to position themselves as an employer and to search for new employees or experts. Example of business networks are Linkedin and Xing.
- Collaborative projects. Collaborative projects bring together internet users with a common interest projects and/or certain knowledge in order to plan, develop, improve, analyse and/ or test technological, academic, scientific or fun-oriented projects. The results (e.g. programs, codes, findings, results, games) are usually distributed as open source and made available to the public for no charge. Examples of collaborative project are Wikipedia and Mozilla.
- Enterprise social networks. Enterprise social networks are open for registration only to employees of a specific company or group, offering similar features as social
networks, including personal profiles, profile pictures, etc. Companies want to ensure that their employees know one another and exchange experiences and ideas. This
10 helps to increase the efficiency of knowledge management within the firm. Examples of enterprise social networks are Yammer and Socialcast.
- Forums. A forum is a virtual discussion platform where users can ask and/or answer other users' questions and exchange thoughts, opinions or experiences.
Communication here does not happen in real time, like in a chat, but is time delayed and usually visible to the public. Example of forums are Gaia Online and IGN Boards.
- Microblogs. Microblogs restrict the length of postings to approximately 200
characters, which may be the major reason for their popularity. Postings may include pictures or weblinks. Users can subscribe to news from other users, companies, brands or celebrities. Examples of microblogs are Twitter and Tumblr.
- Photo sharing. Photo-sharing websites offer services such as uploading, hosting, managing and sharing of photos. Often, the photos can be edited online, organised in albums and commented upon by other users. Examples of photo sharing are Flickr, and Instagram.
- Product/service reviews. Product and service reviewing websites sell and provide information about products. Customers can evaluate products or certain attributes (e.g.
product quality) and write or read product reviews. Examples of product/services websites are Amazon and E-bay.
- Social bookmarking. Social bookmarking describes the concept of saving and organising internet bookmarks on a centralised platform in order to share them with friends and other users. Social bookmarks are a valuable indicator for popular websites and other web content. Examples of social bookmarking are Delicious and Pinterest.
- Social gaming. Social games are online games that allow or require social interaction between players, e.g. card or multiplayer games. Example of social gaming are World of Warcraft and Mafia Wars.
- Social networks. Social networks connect people that know one another, share common interests or would like to engage in similar activities. Users have an individual profile; they can be found by other users using their full name, and they upload pictures and videos. Companies use social networks by creating a corporate profile in order to position certain brands and to inform and support existing or to win new customers. Examples of social networks are Facebook and Google+.
- Video sharing. Video-sharing platforms allow users to upload and share personal,
11 business or royalty-free videos and to watch them legally. Most websites offer the opportunity to comment on specific videos. Companies use these social media to share commercials, to test unconventional promotional videos or to save costs, which are much lower compared to TV advertising. Example of video sharing platforms are Youtube and Vimeo.
- Virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are populated by many users who can create a personal avatar, and simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, participate in its activities or communicate with others. In contrast to computer games, time
continues even when the user is not logged in. Virtual worlds often use virtual currencies, which have an actual value, and allow companies to sell virtual or real products. Example of virtual worlds are Second Life and Twinity. (Aichner and Jacob 2015: 259-260).
For what concerns social media employment by users, table 3 displays the most used social media according to their active users as of January 2014.
Social Media name Website Active users/month
Facebook www.facebook.com 1,190,000,000
Youtube www.youtube.com 1,000,000,000
Google+ plus.google.com 540,000,000
Linkedin www.linkedin.com 259,000,000
Twitter www.twitter.com 232,000,000
Total 3,221,000,000
Table 3. Most used social media as of January 2014. (Aichner and Jacob, 2015: 264)
Active users are defined as registered users that log in the website using their account, disregarding if he/she posts, shares, comments, likes, or how much time he/she stays
connected to the social media. Observing table 3 it is clear the dominion of social networking platforms among social media, leaving just Youtube to represent the video-sharing category on one side, and Twitter to represent microblogs on the other side. Linkedin is a social network too, although business-oriented. The tendency of using social networks as preferred social media services is highlighted also in table 4.
12 Table 4. Number of social network users worldwide updated to 2017 and predictions to 2021. Source:
Statista15.
The data until 2017 esteem 2.46 billion users of social networks whereas the predictions for the years from 2018 to 2021 (labelled in table 4 with a *) are signalling a stable increase of social networks users. What is noticeable is the fact that if these predictions will be respected, more than the half of this planet inhabitants will be connected with the Internet, and
interconnected one another within the social network context.
Table 5 tells us more about the most popular social networks worldwide ranked by the number of active users. By comparing these numbers (January 2018) with the ones in table 3 (January 2014) we can see that Facebook, always at the top in 2014 as in 2018, has steeply incremented its number of active users (from 1 billion to more than 2 billion). Youtube remains in second position but it increases the number of active users of half billion in 2018 (from 1 billion to 1.5 billion). Interestingly, Google+ has shifted from its more than half billion users to being out of the top 24 list of the most popular networks worldwide in 2018, probably due to the scarce employment by users of its social network, cannibalized by all the others. Linkedin and Twitter slip from the fourth and fifth position of 2014 to the fourteenth and eleventh position, but they both increase their active users.
15 https://www.statista.com/
13 Table 5. Most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2018. Source: Statista.
14
1.6 - Corporate identity and Social Media
Corporate blogs, one of the many social media tools and corporate communication devices nowadays available for companies, firms and organizations, are the main focus and object of analysis of the present dissertation. Important to say is, that social media have irrevocably changed the environment within which organizations and stakeholders exist (Mangold and Faulds, 2009). The turbulent Web 2.0 setting throughout which corporations move require them to constantly communicate and control their identity (Devereux et al.
2017). Indeed, the concept of corporate identity is of crucial importance for an organization, since it has been described as the “what” of an organization (Balmer and Greyser, 2002) or its
“essence” (Olins, 1979: 65). Social media development pushed to the edge the corporate identity issue, since many of the social media platforms enable users with the same set of tools for self-expression and communication: it is now up to the user - and then the organizations – to create a unique identity with the same tools (Devereux et al. 2017).
Until now there has been no widely accepted definition of corporate identity. It has been defined as “what an organization is” (Balmer and Greyser, 2002), “what a company’s
‘essence’ is” (Olins, 1979: 65), “all corporate expression” (Cornelissen and Harris, 2001: 63).
Melewar (2003) defines corporate identity as what makes an organization unique, encompassing also organization’s communication, design, culture, behaviour, structure, industry identity and strategy. Topalian defines corporate identity as “the articulation of what an organization is, what it stands for, what it does and how it goes about its business
(especially the way it relates to its stakeholders and the environment)” (2003: 1119). Recently, Flint et al. suggest that corporate identity “refers to what an organization stands for and the mix of elements that give the organization distinctiveness” (Flint, Signori, Golicic 2018: 70).
Surely enough is that corporate identity is something possessed by all organizations and any organization, regardless of size, possess it (Balmer and Gray, 2003).
A widely-quoted model for describing corporate identity is given by Balmer (2001). He introduced the idea of corporate identity management mix. On the one hand, he listed the elements belonging to the corporate identity mix, namely corporate communication, corporate culture, corporate strategy and corporate structure. On the other hand he juxtaposed and complemented them with other three elements required for their management, namely environmental forces, stakeholders and corporate reputation. Figure 1 represents Balmer’s corporate identity management mix.
15 Figure 1. The corporate identity management mix. (Balmer, 2001: 263)
Summing up, as Poppi (2012) argues, corporate identity gives centrality, uniqueness and continuity to an organization and it is key aspect for gaining strategic advantage.
Despite the presence of a massive amount of literature on corporate identity, researches about this topic are currently ongoing and in continuous evolution. Recent worth of mention studies on corporate identity have been conducted by Flint et al. (2018) and by Balmer himself (2017).
In a recent article, Balmer (2017) explains what he calls the “continuum” of corporate identity, total corporate communications, stakeholders’ attributed identities, identifications and behaviours. This continuum is represented in figure 2 in its diagrammatic form. As we can see, corporate identity is the cornerstone of the entire continuum. I will now briefly describe the main blocks composing Balmer’s continuum.
16 Figure 2. The corporate identity, total corporate communications, stakeholders’ attributed identities, identifications and behaviours continuum. (Balmer, 2017: 1477).
The continuum’s core is corporate identity. According to Balmer, the key elements of an organisation’s corporate identity are: an institution’s organizational type; its purpose(s);
activities; ethos and values; market position; markets and customers served; product and service quality; management and employee behaviours; geographic scope.
The next block of the schema is about total corporate communication and stakeholder prioritisation. Total corporate communication has to be understood as a link between an organisation’s corporate identity and the perceptions (corporate images, corporate reputations and attributed identities) assigned to the organisation’s stakeholders (Balmer 2017: 1480). The concept of total corporate communication is based on the assumption that “everything an organisation does will in some way communicate the organisation’s identity” (Balmer 1995:
35). Accordingly, total corporate communication (which encompasses discourses between stakeholders and others) will express an organisation’s identity and will furthermore influence perceptions (and ultimately behaviours) of an entity (Balmer 2017: 1481).
17 Stakeholder prioritisation is a key aspect for senior management. In addition to customers, also stakeholders contribute to the continuity and the success of an organization, and
stakeholders’ prioritisation by senior management is fundamental in the continuum schema.
Another part of the schema relates to attributed identity. This notion is related to stakeholders, which “will discern what they believe are an organisation’s identity traits and, as such, attribute an identity to the form (attributed identity)” (Balmer 2017: 1484).
Proceeding in the continuum we encounter external and internal stakeholder
identification and attitudes. Senior management has also to take in account key stakeholders identification with the organization. Stakeholders identify themselves with the organization when they “define themselves (or not) in terms an organisation and this will inform their attitudes towards a company” (Balmer 2017: 1484).
Subsequent important blocks of the continuum relate to the external and internal stakeholders behaviour, which may confirm or disconfirm corporate identity. From a senior management point of view, stakeholders may identify or not with the corporate identity. When stakeholders identify themselves with the organization, this will translate in a positive
behaviour towards it. Instead, if stakeholders have a negative identification with the
organization, senior management has to be ready to bear the effects of the negative behaviour of the stakeholders towards the company. Balmer defines the link between identification and behaviour as “likely to be palpable” (2017: 1487).
The last two blocks concern the strategic analysis of business environment and
management intervention, direction and leadership. According to Balmer, strategic analyses are a “strategic imperative” and “shape corporate strategy and changes in strategy and will, by default, modify an organisation’s future corporate identity” (Balmer 2017: 1488). Instead, senior management intervention, direction and leadership are a key instrument in order to
“appraise the saliency, sustainability and profitability (from company-stakeholder
perspectives) of an entity’s corporate identity attributes” (Balmer 2017: 1489). Summing up, in his continuum model Balmer stresses the importance of corporate identity as a fundamental tool to be managed strategically by the senior management in order to maintain an
organization successful.
Even more recent is the study on corporate identity by Flint et al. (2018). They introduce the new concept of Corporate Identity Congruence. According to them, sometimes
organizations constitute complex identities which may convey more meanings. This in turn may lead to confusion in the message(s) that the company wants to express to stakeholders.
18 Here comes the concept of Corporate Identity Congruence (CIC). Congruence is a cognitive psychology topic that explains how well and to what extent elements aggregate together and fit in the human mind (Flint et al. 2018). The idea underpinning CIC is that the different meanings of corporate identity have to be congruent in the mind of an organization senior management. In this way, managers will “understand clearly what their firms stand for and the messages they are sending about the company through all elements they manage” (Flint et al. 2018: 68).
1.7 - Social Media effects on corporate identity
Since whatever an organization does impacts corporate identity (Balmer, 1995), Devereux et al. (2017) suggest that each stage of Social Media use by organizations would contribute to and portray elements of it. In their recent research, they identified five main social media stages contributing to corporate identity, namely: social media adoption, choice of platform/s, choice of content, level of engagement and level of organizational interaction.
For every stage they listed issues related to them, describing the associations between the stage of Social Media taken into account and corporate identity. Devereux et al.’s framework is graphically represented in figure 3.
Regarding Social Media adoption by corporations, the decision to use Social Media at all would reveal something about its corporate identity. If the organization use a Social Media, it means that it exists, and, as Heidegger (1969, in Devereux et al. 2017) says, if something exists it has an identity. Why to use Social Media is a large part of corporate identity, and is considered of vital importance for an organization (Devereux et al. 2017). Reasons for an organization to use social media, according to Tsimonis and Dimitriadis (2014), are: social media growth and popularity, social media viral capabilities, presence of competitors on social media, headquarters’ social media strategy and cost reduction pressure. Tuten and Solomon (2014) add some marketing reasons to use social media: promotion, branding, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and service recovery, e-commerce and marketing research. Social media may be for internal or external use. Setting up internal social media (like internal social networks, collaborative projects and internal systems of communication) can increase corporate culture and corporate organizational identity, both of them
encompassed by the wider concept of corporate identity (Devereux et al. 2017). External social media may spread corporate identity to a vast public and create significant relationships
19 with stakeholders, aiding also the visibility of the corporation. Who will maintain a corporate social media is also a crucial question, because they will be assigned with much responsibility (Devereux et al. 2017).
Social media platform choices for an organization are many. A company may opt for blogs, business networks, collaborative projects, enterprise social networks, forums, microblogs, photo sharing, product/services reviews, social bookmarking, social gaming, video sharing and virtual worlds (see also § 1.5). Bearing these possible choices in mind and assuming the both famous and criticized stance by McLuhan, who tells us that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964), the choice of the platform by an organization will reveal part of the organization social identity, considered in turn as a part of corporate identity (Devereux et al. 2017). A company should decide how many social media platform to use. Organizations tend to use a combination of social media (Devereux et al. 2017). A company should also understand which company to choose on the basis of the message they want to communicate, and also depending on the target audience. Also when a platform is adopted it can give hints on the corporate identity. Early adopters of a new social media platform can enhance their identity as innovators, whereas late adopters could be identified as laggards.
20 Figure 3. The relationship between social media and corporate identity. (Devereux et al., 2017: 126)
21 Choice of content is very important for organisations because it will measure users’
engagement. In order to be effective the content has to be similar throughout every social platform used by the organization and it has to be coordinated for fitting into the whole corporate communication strategy. The reason for creating such content could be manifold, for example to create relationships or to foster values, revealing in turn details about
organisation’s strategy and thus corporate identity (Devereux et al. 2017). This content may come from three sources: it may be created by the organization, it can be content curated when it is shared from other sources (for instance a Twitter retweet) and it can ultimately be co-created. The first kind of content is expression of direct dissemination of the organization corporate identity. The second kind of content would exhibit stories, content and news the company identifies with, revealing social identity of the organization. Ultimately, co-created content is a blend of the two former kinds of content, being created with another group of user/s. Co-created content may help company to unveil new aspects of itself, but also to its audience, contributing to corporate identity (Devereux et al. 2017) Even the form of the content may reveal something about organization identity. Social media communication is predominantly experienced in visual and written manner, making visual identity and language descriptors of corporate identity (Devereux et al. 2017). The content itself, that consists of posts, information, news can portray identity. Another aspect revealing corporate identity is the velocity of publishing on social media. In the real-time marketing arena, the speed of sharing information is important. If a corporation decides to share first or later something, this is revelatory of some aspects about corporate identity (Devereux et al. 2017).
Stakeholder engagement is another social media aspect contributing to corporate
identity. The organization may choose the level of involvement it has with its stakeholder, and depending on this level it could consider them as part of its corporate identity (Devereux et al.
2017).
Organization interactions are about the company publishing content on the one hand and responding to stakeholder engagement on the other hand. A signal certifying how an
organization reacts to engagement is publishing content and responding to comments of other users. Here social media may be used as customer relationship management tools, or for crisis management, showing the organization corporate identity. In addition to reacting to
engagement, an organization is able to interact with other users. Interactions with users is exemplified by the number of likes and followers an organization has, or if the organization answers to users’ comments. In this case, corporate identity will be shaped and developed
22 thanks to the organization’s interactions with users. (Devereux et al. 2017).
This first chapter was meant to describe the framework within which blogs are placed, that is, the Social Media arena. In this broad landscape, blogs are just one instrument in the hands of individuals and businesses willing to communicate via Internet in a context of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). After defining what Social Media are, more in- depth detail about Social Media were provided, including Web and the Internet and Web 2.0 and its peculiar features, namely the allowance for User Generated Content (UGC). Then, an overview of the main social media was introduced. In the last part of the chapter the link between social media and corporate identity was disclosed, presenting the five main stages of social media use by organizations which may contribute to corporate identity, namely: social media adoption, choice of platform/s, choice of content, level of engagement and level of organizational interaction. In the following chapter we will get closer to the object of our analysis, corporate blogs, starting with the analysis of their closest and basic progenitor: the blog.
23
Chapter 2. Blogs
2.1 - Blogs’ history
The first and primitive version of a blog was an online diary launched by Justin Hall in 1994, Justin’s Links. Links.net16 is still available on the Internet, and a small message on the top-right of its homepage, exemplified by figure 1, introduces the visitors to the website saying: “Links.net. Justin Hall's personal site growing & breaking down since 1994”. By clicking on a close link, with a new webpage another short message appears:
Hello, my name is Justin Hall and I've been sharing my personal life in explicit detail online for over twenty years. Starting in 1994, my personal web site Justin's Links from the Underground has documented family secrets, romantic relationships, and my experiments with sex and drugs.
In fact, the timeline shown by Thompson17 (2006) says that Links.net marks the first inception of blogging and, as McCullough (2017) admits, many people consider Justin Hall as
“if not the first, then spiritually, at least, the ‘first’ blogger18”.
Figure 1. Opening message of Links.net. Retrieved from http://www.links.net/.
As Rettberg remembers,
at first, the website was written as a meandering hypertextual story about Hall’s life, but in 1996 Hall began posting dated diary entries that still linked and intermingled with this hypertextual autobiography (2016: 3).
16 http://www.links.net/
17 http://nymag.com/news/media/15971/
18 http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/06/the-first-blog-justin-hall/
24 Still, he did not name his website as a weblog until much later, for the term “weblog” was used in principle to refer to the statistics that the website administrators could access which showed the number of website visitors (Rettberg 2016).
It was only in 1997 that U.S. weblog writer Jorn Bargier, creator of the website “Robot Wisdom”, suggested the term weblog to identify websites posting links to interesting material with commentary (Blood, 2000; Rettberg, 2016). One year later, Miller and Sheperd reported the first press mention of the term “blog” (Miller and Shepherd, 2004).
One year later, in 1999, there were just a few weblogs online. As Blood (2000) reminds,
in 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs.
Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of "other sites like his" as he found them in his travels around the web. In November of that year, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett. Cameron published the list on Camworld, and others maintaining similar sites began sending their URLs to him for inclusion on the list. Jesse's 'page of only weblogs' lists the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning of 199919.
Finally, Peter Merholz announced in the early 1999 he was going to pronounce the term weblog as “wee blog”, that was later shortened into the final version as we know it nowadays,
“blog”. Up to that point, the number of blogs from the just 23 existing in 1999 began to grow exponentially, as shown in table 1 below.
Table 1. The increase in number of blogs. The scale is logarithmic. (Jones and Alony, 2008:
434).
19 http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
25 Blogs were initially websites including links, commentary, thoughts and opinions, and essays (Blood, 2000). Early blogs’ characteristics were basically three: they were organized in chronological order, they had list of links to other websites of interest, and they allowed comments on links (Miller and Shepherd, 2004). An interesting point is, that only those who were able to master HTML coding could come up with a blog. Indeed, as Miller and Shepherd remind us,
the early bloggers were web-savvy individuals, generally designers or programmers working in the technology industry. Not only did they have to be able to locate information on the Web before search engines became as accessible as they are today, but they had to be able to code their own HTML pages (2004: 6).
But the capacity of coding in HTML in order to blog was to be a necessity for a short time only. Blogs continued to grow in number throughout 1999, until in July of the same year Pitas, a weblog tool that allowed people to build their own blog, was launched. Two months later another tool for blogs publishing launched, namely the famous Blogger (subsequently acquired by Google in 2003), together with LiveJournal and Xanga. Software developer Dave Winer launched in late 1999 Edit This Page, while Jeff A. Campbell launched Velocinews.
These were all free services that permitted and facilitated weblogs publication by the people, avoiding the problem of mastering HTML coding language.
The beginning of the new millennium marked the growing period of blogs. From 1999 to the present time blogs’ number steeply increased. In February, 2002, Technorati, one of the first blog search engines, was launched. 2002 also marked the arrival of the first political blogs and the first meta-blogs, which taught with in-depth tutorial on how to blog (Barron 2016). Miller and Shepherd, reporting Henning (2003), confirm that
a 2003 survey found that new blogs on eight popular blog hosting sites increased by more than six hundred percent between 2000 and 2001, with over four million blogs by the time of the survey and 10 million projected by the end of 2004 (2004: 6).
Table 2 illustrates the number of blogs worldwide from 2006 to 2011. In October 2006 there were almost 36 millions blogs worldwide. Instead, in 2011 the number of blogs
26 worldwide was about 173 millions, attesting the incremental growth of blogs number in recent years.
Table 2. Number of blogs worldwide from 2006 to 2011. Source: Statista
In year 2003 both Wordpress and Typepad were launched, allowing users to additional platform creating options, in line with the trend began in 1999 with Pitas and Blogger (Zantal -Wiener 2016). In the same year, another important milestone in blogs’ history was the
possibility of earning income from blogging. With Blog Ads (by Pressflex LLC) and AdSense (by Google) bloggers where able to monetize their work, meanwhile many people started blogging as a job (Barron 2016, Zantal-Wiener 2016).
In 2004 Steve Garfield become the pioneer of video blogging, calling that year the one of video blog.
One year later even the video-uploading platform Youtube (acquired by Google in 2006) was launched: from that moment on, people were able to upload their video on the Internet.
The same year marked also another important event: in March 2005 blogger Garrett Graff was the first to be granted access to the White House with a press pass. In addition to that, two months lather the famous news blog website Huffington Post were launched, along with a
27 new era of “cyber-journalists” (Barron 2016, Zantal-Wiener 2016). Figure 2 exemplifies the main phases in blogging history, from 1994 to 2009.
Figure 2. History of blogging timeline from 1994 to 2009.
(https://brandswithfansblog.fandommarketing.com/history-of-blogging-timeline/)
In 2006 microblogging sprang up. Posting stories, contents, images and videos in the smallest format possible was allowed by platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. Whit these platforms and the consolidated traditional blogs’ ones, people were allowed to a more than ever facilitation in writing and expressing thoughts and opinions. But this liberty led to some problems like mean tweets and harmful comments on blogs (Barron 2016).
That is why Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales proposed some boundaries with the Blogger’s code of conduct, drafted in 2007. It proposed rules of well behaving in blog conducting and commenting, as well as appealing to a common sense of responsibility in expressing opinions (Zantal-Wiener 2016).
From 2008 to 2011 the blogs’ world did not register novelties of relevance, stagnating in
28 a format that was at this point well consolidated and accepted by people. One exception, the 2009 event of the launching of the White House blog (Zantal-Wiener 2016).
The last two facts worth of mentioning about blogs date back to 2012, when Medium and the Linkedin influencer’s program Pulse was launched. Medium is the newest blogging
platform, its originality consisting in the introduction of decentralized content20. Linkedin influencer’s program, Pulse, was reserved for guest blogging of notable business figures at first. Then it became available to all Linkedin members two years later, in 2014. Both
Medium and Pulse allow for content creators and bloggers a bigger visibility than traditional blogs, and that is why they have stood out in a quite busy blogging platform and social media panorama (Barron 2016).
In 2008 Jones and Alony reported that Technorati, had counted as of March 2006 an amount of 30 million bloggers on the Internet. Pedersen & Macafee updated this number to 90 million referring to July, 2007. Jones and Alony (2008) affirmed moreover that Technorati esteemed a doubling of blogs every six months, while Flynn (2006) further strengthened this evaluation affirming that a new blog is opened every second.
In 2016 Gilbert, Clark and Roy reported that WPVirtuoso (Interesting Facts, 2013) esteemed that 172,800 blogs are created every day, while Neville (2014) said 400 million people viewed 14.4 billion pages per month. Haynes (2011) states that if there is the possibility of one billion blogs globally, this translates in one out of three persons reading blogs worldwide.
For sure, even if bloggers, blogs and blogging platforms can change, re-shape and modify throughout years, the necessity to share contents, videos, comments, stories and so on is far to be abandoned. As Barron (2016) argues, “the blogging scene has a bright future ahead. The medium might change, but people will always find a way to share content with millions of visitors21”.
20 Zantal-Wiener (2016) defines decentralization as “a concept that allows users to share their work that has been published elsewhere on a content creation platform. That’s different than sharing links on social media, for example, where limited content is displayed. Instead, the full text and images of the work are shared, with the original author and source credited, on a site different from its origin”. Retrieved from
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-blogging
21 https://blogging.com/history/
29
2.2 - What is a blog?
At the beginning of this chapter, we had a glance at the history of blogs, how they were born and how they have evolved until now. But what exactly is a blog, and what are the main features a website has to have in order to be classified as such?
According to Winer (2003), a blog is “a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser” and “the unedited voice of a person22”.
Blood (2000) states a blog is “a website that is updated frequently, with new material posted at the top of page” and “an outbreak of self expression23”.
Jones and Alony define blogs as “frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological order” and “an amalgam between a diary, a web site, and an online community” (2008: 1).
Miller and Shepherd affirm blogs are defined by “reverse chronology, frequent updating, links and commentary”, but also mentioning their “immediately real and genuinely personal”
(2004: 7).
Fleck et al. summarize that “Blogs are online publications that are characterised by short entries which are usually written in an expressive and authentic style and are arranged in reverse chronological order” (2007: 228).
By seeing all these definition, it stands out that the blogging phenomenon is described as being articulated into two distinct levels. The first entails a “common ground all bloggers share—the format” (Hourihan, 2002), intended as a set of characteristics that are typical for every blog in the blogosphere. The second level deals with the personal features that bloggers are able to imprint while writing blog posts, making blogs also “personal, […] imbued with the temper of their writer” (Sullivan, 2002).
Indeed, one of the reason contributing to the success of blogs is the fact they enable, through their writers, a freedom of expression which in other media may not be immediately recognisable (Hull, 2007). In Hiler’s words, blog is a “’killer app’, that has the capacity to engage people in collaborative activity, knowledge sharing, reflection and debate” (2002: 4).
This personal imprinting makes blogs similar to other forms of human communication, since they are unstructured, organic and opportunistic (William and Jacobs, 2004). Blogs are
22 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/whatmakesaweblogaweblog.html
23 http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
30 opportunistic because they are a “product of convenience rather than design” (William and Jacobs, 2004), this meaning they focus on allowing and facilitating communication between people. Finally, blogs are based on reverse chronological news posting, which often contain hyperlinks to other websites, and on the comments function that allows users to respond, evaluate or criticise an article: these are all different and then unstructured functions which anyway work together in the blogging activity, constituting an organic set of options for users.
This freedom of expression translates also into blogs’ versatility. In fact, blogs’ topics cover a wide range of subject areas, and this quote from Jones and Alony makes it very clear:
Schmidt (2007) lists various types of blogs, including: political blogs, corporate blogs, expert blogs, and personal knowledge blogs. There are also educational blogs, creative writing blogs, journalism blogs, medical blogs, drug blogs, abortion blogs, car blogs, travel blogs, and the list continues. In fact, any subject which generates interest among a reasonably sized group of people has the potential to become a blog. In addition, a blog is not necessarily an individual enterprise (Williams & Jacobs, 2004), as shown by the existence of group blogs such as: “family blogs, community blogs, and corporate blogs”. Other blogs are defined by their content: 'WarBlogs' (a product of the Iraq War), and 'LibLogs' (library bogs) (Williams
& Jacobs, 2004). However, most blogs tend to be personal journals by single authors (Qian &
Scott, 2007; Schmidt, 2007) (2008: 434).
Other reasons for the success of blogs are the ever increasing accessibility and ubiquity of the Internet, coupled with many social software programs allowing people to create blogs in an easy way. In addition to that, the entry barriers for blogging are very small (Jones and Alony, 2008). As Rosenbloom puts it, “A blogger needs only a computer, internet access, and an opinion. It also helps to have a personal obsession and total confidence in your own voice”
(2004: 31). Another reason for blogging proliferation is the widespread acceptance of blogs as communication tools on the one hand, and as information source on the other hand. The
‘personal obsession’ quoted by Rosenbloom (2004) is now mainstream and accepted, supported also by the public (Jones and Alony, 2008).
In the following paragraphs we will examine the typical characteristics of a blog, along with the reasons leading individuals blogging. To conclude, an analysis of the blog as a genre will be provided.
