| Micro-Dialogues in Cyberspace - McDonalds Blogging Efforts in Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility online (2009) | |||||||||||
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| This article presents an explorative case study exploring McDonald's "Open for discussion" blog dedi-cated to documenting the company's social and environmental efforts. Our investigation into this new form of organization-stakeholder interaction is based on two complementary research approaches: webmet-rics, to describe the general popularity of the blog itself and the use social network analysis to investigate how well the blog is connected with the overall blogosphere. Our results indicate that companies can reach highly engaged stakeholders via weblogs, however, only a few actors were actually involved into each single discussion. We therefore introduce the concept of online micro-dialogues as proxies for numerous face-to-face communications about similar issues between the company and its stakeholder base and which might be an avenue to better understand how organizations interact online with their stakeholders. | |||||||||||
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