Dialogic Qualities in Corporate Blogs: An Exploratory Study

Dialogic engagement theory suggests that, through dialogues, public relations crates, maintains, and negotiates relationships among multiple stakeholders, competing interests, and even hostile others. This exploratory study investigated the extent to which large Korean firms build dialogic qualities into their corporate blogs. Further, we examined how blogging strategies, industry environment, and time affect dialogic qualities in corporate blogs. We focused on two dialogic principles of dialogic loop and ease of the interface. The content analysis of 63 corporate blogs of large Korean firms over about 3 years indicated that little dialogical loop qualities were implemented into corporate blogs, signaling one-way communication with little encouragement to engage in interactive and meaningful dialogues. On the other hand, the ease of the interface features of dialogic qualities were extensively utilized, making the visit to corporate blogs relatively easy and even enjoyable. Blogging strategies(individual, group, and promotion), industry environment(high tech, manufacturing, and service), and the passage of time(2008 vs 2010) had no bearing on variations of dialogic qualities. Implications are noted.