Micro-Dialogues in Cyberspace - McDonalds Blogging Efforts in Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility online
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2009-05-21
Author(s)
Abstract
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.
Language
English
Keywords
Corporate Communications
Corporate Social Responsibility
Web 2.0
Corporate Weblogs
Social Networks
Stakeholder Communication
HSG Classification
not classified
Refereed
Yes
Event Title
59th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA)
Event Location
Chicago, IL USA
Event Date
21.-25.05.2009
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
51030