Organizational blogs are more conversational than web sites

Blogs are a good place to speak candidly with a conversational style (e.g., "invite people to a conversation"), and this conversational style may be an important part of the process of building and maintaining computer-mediated relationships for organizations, conclude Tom Kelleher and Barbara M Miller in their paper “Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes", published in the latest issue of Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Some of the most important findings of their study, where the hypotheses of the potential advantages of organizational blogs over traditional Web sites were tested, are

• blogs were perceived as more conversational than organizational Web sites
• this conversational human voice correlated positively with other previously-identified relationship outcomes. The perceived personal nature of organizational blogs, in this case, is related to relationship indicators.

However, the authors note, "blogs allow people representing organizations to speak candidly, blogs may not be the best venue for "PR" messages intended to talk up an organization's commitment to its public relationships."