Browsing by Author "Fleck, Matthes"

In this paper we utilize social network analysis to examine the interaction patterns between corporate blogs devoted to sustainability issues and the blogosphere, a clustered online network of collaborative actors. By analyzing the structural embeddedness of a prototypical blog in such a virtual community, we show the potentials of online platforms for engagement with an increasingly socially and ecologically aware customer base. It is furthermore demonstrated that consumer involvement via sustainability blogs is a valuable new practice for communications and brand management and opens new horizons for communicating corporate social responsibility issues to key constituencies online.

Recently, blogs have gained a lot of attention as an instrument within corporate communication. There are numerous discussions and research projects in various academic disciplines about blogs creating a diffuse body of knowledge with different concepts, notions, and ideas. This paper summarises typologies from these different disciplines and tries to integrate them into a multidimensional model in which all relevant aspects and applications of blogs are considered. The results are summarised in the St. Galler blog cube.

This paper uses social network analysis to examine the interaction between corporate blogs devoted to sustainability issues and the blogosphere, a clustered online network of collaborative actors. By analyzing the structural embeddedness of a prototypical blog in a virtual community, we show the potential of online platforms to document corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and to engage with an increasingly socially and ecologically aware stakeholder base. The results of this study show that stakeholder involvement via sustainability blogs is a valuable new practice for CSR communications and stakeholder engagement. It also opens new horizons for communicating CSR issues to key constituencies online.

In situations of extreme uncertainty, such as the public riots after the Iran elections, journalists often have to rely on few and sometimes intransparent sources of information, increasingly located in the online realm. In our paper we retrace the information sources of key journalists during and after the Iran elections. To achieve this end, we applied social network analysis on data from the online micro-blogging service twitter, collected using an open-source Ruby-on-Rails web-application for gathering information on twitterers, their tweets and their shared interests. Focusing on three twitter accounts from prominent bloggers with expertise about Iran, Nico Pitney (Huffington Post), Andrew Sullivan (Atlantic Monthly) and Robert Mackey (N.Y. Times), we identified three different patterns. In structural terms, Nico Pitney�s network resembles an expert network with close relationships to other similarly interested actors. In contrast, Andrew Sullivan�s network is widely spread out among topics and interests, functioning more as a radar screen for issues on the rise. Finally, a third role is characterized by Robert Mackey whose network shows brokerage patterns, with his contacts either being colleagues from New York Times or experts about Iran among whom he is in an intermediation position. This case study of these three prototypical journalistic roles in online networks has implications beyond the particular example of the Iranian Elections, as it might illustrate how professional journalists might discover and develop stories in a future, more and more online driven environment.

This article presents an explorative case study exploring McDonald's "Open for discussion" blog dedi-cated to documenting the company's social and environmental efforts. Our investigation into this new form of organization-stakeholder interaction is based on two complementary research approaches: webmet-rics, to describe the general popularity of the blog itself and the use social network analysis to investigate how well the blog is connected with the overall blogosphere. Our results indicate that companies can reach highly engaged stakeholders via weblogs, however, only a few actors were actually involved into each single discussion. We therefore introduce the concept of online micro-dialogues as proxies for numerous face-to-face communications about similar issues between the company and its stakeholder base and which might be an avenue to better understand how organizations interact online with their stakeholders.

With the emergence of participative, social media, the way stakeholders perceive and interact with companies is changing. In this paper, we want to analyze how changes in today's infor-mation and communication technologies may affect CSR research and policies. As a means of analysis, a framework of Internet-based social capital is derived, analyzing how social capital is created, how it is put to use, and how it is maintained by firms engaging into ethical, social and environmental engagement. To illustrate the implications laid down in this framework, we utilize social network analysis to analyze the CSR blogs of three IT firms, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Intel. We conclude by proposing research implications for shifting social capital dynamics and derive implications for management and practice.

This article intends to provide an overview of the most prominent definitions, basic concepts and applications of the term Web 2.0. In addition to the seven principles outlined by O`Reilly, this article will investigate Anderson's long tail concept, issues of transparency and the effects of an interconnected user base on E-Business. Later, the focus will shift from the concepts of Web 2.0 towards the social software applications of this new Web era. Blogs, social network sites, wikis, folksonomies and virtual worlds will be explained and their (potential) relevance to E-Business will be outlined. The article closes with a brief discussion about the future research directions of Web 2.0 for successful E-Business.

Past studies on weblogs and the blogosphere have indicated that reputation building is one of the most important motivation for individual bloggers. In our research we argue that corporations should include weblogs in their communication matrix for the use of reputation building. Therefore we propose the use of special interest topics in weblogs as an effective way to create suitable and remarkable attention. The central research question is which types of special interest weblogs can be identified in that context to be successful. Furthermore it is of special interest in which relation the content of those blogs is associated to the core business of the company.