eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

Objective of the study:

The objective of the present study is to analyze stakeholder communication in an executive blog from the perspective of how transmissive or interactive it is. The purpose is to find out which groups are communicated with in the blog, and whether there are differences in the interactivity of communication when communicating with different stakeholder groups. In addition, the study aims to discover what kind of comments are attached to the blog entries. This is done from three perspectives: those of type, attitude and dialogic nature.

Methodology:

The method used in the study is mainly qualitative content analysis, and more specifically directed approach to it. Some pre-existing categories were used, but these categories were then during the analysis modified on the basis of the research data. The study is a case study that uses the executive blog by the American gas and oil company ExxonMobil as research material.

Findings:

The results of the study suggest that the interactive possibilities that the blog provides are severely underutilized in the case blog. Communication with all stakeholder groups was found to be transmissive in nature, and no notable differences between different stakeholder groups emerged. The most common type of the comments was found to be elaborations. Most of the comments had a supportive attitude towards the blogger, which suggests that some monitoring of comments may take place. The majority of the comments were not interactive, and of the interactive comments, few were dialogic.