The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer ... - Oapen

Origins of corporate blogging 83
them inadequately: legal trouble, disgruntled customers, damage to the brand
(Wolff, 2006; Martin, 2007; Brandel, 2007). A concise list of risks comes from
Huyse, with issues ranging from “loss of control over the message” to “negative
impact on stock price” (2007, no pagination). Despite deliberations especially
pertaining to legal risks, blogging is evaluated relatively positively not only by
consultants, who arguably have a vested interest in promoting this new form
of corporate communication that they can explain and sell to their corporate
customers, but also by businesses themselves. The evaluation depends on many
factors, the most pivotal being the match up of goals with returns (the return
on investment, or ROI of blogging). Blogs are clearly not a magic formula for
boosting sales, improving reputation, conducting market research and managing
knowledge, but many corporate practitioners believe that they can contribute
to attaining these goals.
It is possible to approach the origins of corporate blogging from two different
viewpoints: firstly in historical, and secondly in ontological terms. Historically,
corporate blogging as it is defined here evolved from employee blogging, the
latter being characterized by a grassroots quality that the former lacks. In their
study of employee blogging at Microsoft, Efimova and Grudin noted that corporate
blogging is a term “which suggests action that is authorized, acknowledged,
or in a formal way associated with an organization” (2007, p. 2), a characteristic
not universally applicable to employee blogging. The authors describe the
genesis of blogs at Microsoft as follows:
The first Microsoft bloggers were students with externally hosted
weblogs who were hired as interns or employees, starting in 2000
and 2001. Their weblogs attracted little attention. By mid-2002
employees were manually hosting weblogs on company machines and
arguing for externally visible weblogs. An internal weblog server,
maintained through voluntary efforts, hosted a few dozen weblogs
by the end of the year. Late in 2002 a list of employee weblogs,
including some hosted externally, was published by someone outside
the organization (Mary Jo Foley in Microsoft Watch). This helped
create a sense of a community engaged in externally visible blogging.
The attention led to internal meetings and reflection. (Efimova and
Grudin, 2007, p. 3)
While there is no historically precise account of who started the first employee
blog in the sense described by Efimova and Grudin (2007), it is plausible
to assume that such an evolutionary process – from scattered private blogs of
junior staff to blogs jointly hosted on corporate servers – took place in a similar
fashion at other software companies such as IBM, Sun, Adobe and Oracle, all
of which today maintain large employee blog hubs (portal sites where employee
blogs are hosted) that bundle the content from several thousand individual
blogs. 2 The style and content of early employee blogs is therefore logically very
close to that of private blogs, specifically the filter variety, which is exemplified
by the post shown in figure 3.3. Koby Parnell, the owner of the early Microsoft
blog shown, used his blog to post lists of links that he wanted to share with
others (or book recommendations, in this case). 3
2See also the discussion in Puschmann (2007b) for an attempt to reconstruct the history
of corporate blogging.
3Note also the blogger’s characterization of the blog as a Wunderkammer in the title.