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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2451/28512
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| Title: | Negative Blogs, Positive Outcomes: When Should Firms Permit Employees
toBlog Honestly |
| Authors: | Aggarwal, Rohit - University of Connecticut
Gopal, Ram - University of Connecticut
Sankaranarayanan, Ramesh - University of Connecticut |
| Keywords: | blog; employee blogs; bloggers; blogging policies; word-of-mouth;
customer advocacy; information processing theory; non-linear models |
| Issue Date: | 2007 |
| Series/Report no.: | NET Institute Working Paper;07-32 |
| Abstract: | Weblogs or blogs have recently received a lot of attention, especially
in the business community, with a number of firms encouraging their
employees to publish blogs to reach out and connect to a wider audience.
It is beginning to be recognized that employee blogs can cast a firm in
either a positive or a negative light, thereby enhancing or harming the
firm’s reputation. Paradoxically, under certain conditions
negative postings by employees can actually help the overall reputation
of the firm. The rationale for this is that negative posts raise the
credibility of an employee blog and attract more readers, who then will
also be exposed to the positive posts on the blog. Drawing from the
literature on customer advocacy and the stage model theory of
information processing in cognitive psychology, we develop a model to
decipher the relationship between the extent of negative posts and the
overall positive Word of Mouth (WOM) generated by the employee blogs for
the firm. An empirical model is developed to account for the inherent
non-linearities, endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity concerns, and
potential alternative specifications. Our results suggest that negative
posts act as a catalyst to increase the readership of an employee blog,
with readership increasing exponentially in the initial stages and then
stabilizing. The empirical findings are used to generate an analytical
framework that firms can use to formulate employee blogging policies. We
illustrate the application of the framework using blogging data from Sun Microsystems. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/28512 |
| Appears in Collections: | NET Institute Working Papers Series
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