Analyzing the topics discussed in CEO blogs: A content analysis approach

More than 100,000 new blogs are created each day. The Internet search engine, Technorati, now indexes more the 120 million blogs. Transparent, highly visible, and easy to use, blogs are also an increasingly popular communication tool for executives and organizations of all shapes and sizes. A survey of CEOs by the communications company, Burson-Marsteller, found that the majority think blogs are useful for internal communications and nearly half say they are effective for external audiences (Sharma 2005). Despite the proliferation of articles, white papers, books and blogs promoting blogging as the 'next big thing', there is a lack of research studies investigating blogs as a business tool. Moreover, very little academic attention has been paid to the content of corporate blogs and to the discussed topics in them. Therefore, the main goal of this content analysis study is to analyze the topics and issues that CEOs discuss in their blogs as a special case of corporate blogging. This research study analyzes 82 U.S. CEO Blogs from different industries. Based on the analysis of these U.S. CEO blogs, we have identified three main stages in corporate blogging usage: Technology, Prescriptive and Customer-Relationship. The findings suggest an important shift from a technology focus to a customer-relationship focus. Thus, it seems that more and more blogs are being used as communication channels among the different business stakeholders.