Exploring the Corporate Blogosphere: A Taxonomy for Research and Practice

Abstract

Corporate blogs have received a great deal of attention recently in the practitioner literature and are gaining interest in the research community, although little is known about the uses and impacts of these blogs. We develop a taxonomy to describe and compare corporate blogs, and then apply it to companies listed on the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, and S&P SmallCap 600 indices. Our findings revealed several main clusters of blogs that are currently being hosted by corporations as well as a few uncommon types of blogs that may represent emerging trends in corporate blogging practices. These findings also suggest that our taxonomy is indeed able to differentiate among different types of corporate blogs and will be a useful tool for future research.