5.1 Theoretical background: Design characteristics in the corporate blog
Table 32: Differences between private and corporate blogs
Private blog Corporate blog
Authors Private individuals, typically self-selected, working on their own
Employees, selected by the company, often with communication or marketing background
Responsibility Individual author Company, usually corporate communication or
marketing department Content Selected by the author, depending on his/her
preferences and opinion
Selected by the company depending on its communication agenda
Purpose Serving the individual’s goals, often intrinsic (see below)
Supporting the company’s communication agenda and goals, mostly extrinsic (see below)
Motivation
Documenting the author’s life Expressing opinion/commenting Coming to terms with issues (catharsis) Thinking through writing
Building/joining a community
Reaching target groups
Communicate corporate topics/views Quick reaction/crisis communication Providing outside stakeholders a platform Interact with target groups personally
While previous corporate blog research focused on either abstract strategic consid-erations (general applications of corporate blogs), or individual corporate blog de-sign aspects such as topics or formality, current research lacks a general corporate blog acceptance model. Such a model needs to integrate strategic aspects, such as attitude of and usage by target groups, with practical design aspects of corporate blogging. Out of the various research streams on information system usage, the technology acceptance model (TAM) – originally introduced by Davis (1986, 1989) as an extension of Ajzen and Fishbein’s (1980) theory of reasoned action – has become the most widely used theory to explore the factors influencing the ac-ceptance of an information technology by users (King and He, 2006, Lee et al., 2003, Venkatesh et al., 2003). According to the original TAM, a user’s attitude to-wards a technology (ATT) is determined by the user’s perception of the usefulness (PU) and the ease of use (PEU) of the technology, which derive from the technolo-gy’s various design features. The user’s attitude then determines the actual use (USE). As information technologies became more complex and varied, and re-searchers became interested in other effects on technology adoption, the TAM was continuously extended, for example by use intention (INT) which serves as the in-termediary between attitude and actual usage (Mathieson, 1991). In addition, vari-ous extensions were proposed depending on the type of information technology including social norms and influence (Hung and Chang, 2005, Luarna and Lin, 2005), and intrinsic motivation, i.e., perceived enjoyment (PE) that can have an impact on attitude exceeding the impact of usefulness (Davis et al., 1992, Hsu and Lin, 2008, Heijden, 2003).
With an increasing number of social media applications and their quickly growing popularity among Internet users, a small stream of research has emerged, focusing particularly on the use and acceptance of various social media within the TAM framework. In general, these studies confirmed the TAM’s validity for the social media context, but found different additional drivers of acceptance. Analyzing the acceptance of a multi-functional web portal, Heijden (2003) found perceived en-joyment to be a key element of the portal’s acceptance, and found a significant in-fluence of the portal’s visual attractiveness on perceived usefulness and enjoyment.
Paris et al. (2010) confirmed the important role of perceived enjoyment for users’
acceptance of Facebook and identified trust, credibility, and relationship-enabling functions as additional system design factors that positively influence acceptance.
For the acceptance of private blogs, Hsu and Lin (2008) identified the author’s reputation and the possibility to establish relationships and community as key fac-tors. A key consideration in TAM research was the effect of design characteristics, being already introduced into technology acceptance theory at very early stages.
Such design characteristics are modeled to affect perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and (later) perceived enjoyment. Davis et al. (1993) found that particu-larly the perceived ease of use was affected by the system’s design. Lederer et al.
(2000) found significant effects of system design on the acceptance of World Wide Web services. Their study identified the ease of understanding and ease of finding as significant factors for the perceived ease of use and information quality as signifi-cant factor for perceived usefulness. In the context of corporate blogs, five main sets of blog characteristics can be identified, whose theoretical integration with the cor-porate blog acceptance model will be discussed subsequently.
Davis (1993) argues that system design features have a direct effect on the perceived ease of use and the perceived usefulness – the beliefs that shape an individual’s atti-tudes towards a specific behavior. In the context of corporate blogs, perceived use-fulness can be defined as the degree to which an individual believes that using a corporate blog would enhance the effectiveness of specific actions related to the corporation, i.e., the purchase task as a consumer. Content characteristics refer to the specific content published on a corporate blog, such as the topics, different con-tent types, or the value of the actual published information. Concon-tent value captures characteristics that relate to the value as well as the credibility of information on a corporate blog. In today’s information rich environment, the relevance and the quality of information have become key criteria for individuals’ information selec-tion and consump selec-tion (Eppler and Mengis, 2004). Being challenged by the vast amount of available information and media channels, individuals simply ignore all information that they regard as irrelevant, useless, or inauthentic and unreliable.
For companies, this implies that in order to be heard by their target audiences they have to produce information that is useful, relevant, and credible to their audiences,
which is of particular importance for proactively consumed digital media (Argenti and Barnes, 2009). In this context, content characteristics were identified as deter-minants of corporate blog success, e.g., by Ahuja and Medury (2010) and Ma and Zhang (2007). Overall, such characteristics can be hypothesized to positively affect perceived usefulness:
Hypothesis 4.1: Corporate blogs’ perceived usefulness is positively affected by the content value of a corporate blog.
In the context of corporate blogs, perceived ease of use can be defined as the degree to which an individual believes that using corporate blogs would be free of effort and would enhance the specific action that is related to the corporation. Blog man-agement reflects the timeliness and professionalism of a corporate blog. In the real-time communication environment on the Internet, digital corporate communica-tion needs to consider its audiences’ expectacommunica-tions and use practices. This in particu-lar regards Internet users’ preferences for current and up-to-date information, the amount and complexity of provided information, and the use of multi-media ele-ments, all of which companies can influence through digital communication man-agement strategies (Argenti and Barnes, 2009). In the corporate blog context, management characteristics refer to the company’s or editor’s management style and practices. Several previous studies assessed corporate blog management issues such as the volume and frequency of posting, the length of posts, or the profession-alism of design (e.g., Ahuja and Medury, 2010, Heijden, 2003, Ma and Zhang, 2007). Within the TAM framework, such design characteristics can be hypothe-sized to be positively related to perceived ease of use:
Hypothesis 4.2: Corporate blogs’ perceived ease of use is positively affected by blog man-agement characteristics.
Usability relates to the structure of and navigation opportunities on a corporate blog. The management aspect comprises both design and strategy issues that impact how easy or difficult users find the use of the communication channel. Particularly in the online environment, usability is influenced by the organization and design of content on the site, the ability to navigate through the site, and the actual aesthetic design of the site (Djonov, 2007, Cyr et al., 2006). By considering and optimizing these factors, companies can support individuals that wish to use the site and create a simpler usage experience. Consequently, corporate blog usability characteristics include elements that determine how easy or difficult it is to use a corporate blog as a reader. This can for example refer to navigation features and subscription oppor-tunities (e.g., Cho and Huh, 2007), or the structure of the blog and its content (Nielsen, 2010b). Information technology research has shown that this is a key
de-terminant of perceived ease of use, implying a positive relationship between the ex-istence of such features and perceived ease of use:
Hypothesis 4.3: Corporate blogs’ perceived ease of use is positively affected by usability characteristics of corporate blogs.
In the context of corporate blogs, perceived enjoyment can be defined as the extent to which the activity of using a corporate blog creates excitement and is perceived as being enjoyable. Entertainment in general is a major motive for individuals’ Inter-net and social media usage (Correa et al., 2010). The overall attractiveness’ of online communication activities is thus not only determined by its usefulness, as discussed above, but also by the level of emotional engagement with users, which in the corporate context is achieved through creating enjoyable and amusing content (Argenti and Barnes, 2009). Entertainment value is associated to the amount of entertainment and the intensity of discussion on a corporate blog. Huang et al.
(2008) showed the importance of the entertainment motive for reading blogs. In this context, an audience’s entertainment is related to various corporate blog char-acteristics such as the various media formats employed, the predominant writing style, or the actual content (Stocker and Tochtermann, 2008). They can be consid-ered important determinants of perceived entertainment value, hypothesizing a pos-itive effect:
Hypothesis 4.4: Corporate blogs’ perceived enjoyment is positively affected by the enter-tainment value of blog content.
Interaction relates to readers’ ability to interact with the corporate blog authors and editors. Interaction covers aspects of relationship building and interactivity on a corporate blog, which in addition to the above discussed entertainment factors can emotionally engage users and thus affect perceived enjoyment. In the online envi-ronment, such engagement can be achieved through more personal connections between company representatives and the support of lively discussions (Argenti and Barnes, 2009). The personal nature of blogs and blog writing makes them a good tool for companies to interact with their stakeholders (Kelleher and Miller, 2006).
Ahuja and Medury (2010), for example, found that companies can increase reader engagement by specifically publishing corporate blog content that stimulates discus-sion. Cho (2006) highlighted the importance of author visibility and disclosure, such as author pictures or real names, implying a positive effect on the level of company-reader interaction on corporate blogs. Consequently, such interaction characteristics can be hypothesized to positively affect entertainment value (Gustavsen and Tilley, 2003, Kelleher and Miller, 2006):
Hypothesis 4.5: Corporate blogs’ perceived enjoyment is positively affected by the level of interaction between Internet users and corporate blog editors and authors.
In addition to the direct effects identified and hypothesized above, technology ac-ceptance literature stipulates several mediation effects by cognitive factors as well as attitude (e.g., Burton-Jones and Hubona, 2006). As outlined above, system design characteristics are assumed to affect usage intention indirectly through the three cognitive factors perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, and perceived ease of use (Venkatesh and Davis, 2000). Consequently, two additional hypotheses are identified to test for the model’s mediation effects:
Hypothesis 4.6a: Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived enjoy-ment mediate the effects of blog design characteristics on Internet users’ attitude towards corporate blogs.
Hypothesis 4.6b: Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment and attitude mediate the effects of blog design characteristics on Internet users’ in-tention to use corporate blogs.
Figure 30 provides an overview of the extended model with the developed Hypoth-eses:
Figure 30: Conceptual model - corporate blog acceptance with design factors