Annette Agerdal-Hjermind

Blogging as a Communication Strategy for Government Agencies: A Danish Case Study

More and more government agencies are starting to use social media as part of their communication strategy to increase organizational transparency, collaborations inside and outside the organization, and public participation. In this study, we investigate how civil servants use a blog in a government agency in Denmark and their viewpoints on the actual contribution of blogging for their organization’s communication goals. The study is longitudinal and qualitative. We collected and analyzed data from focus groups, interviews, observations and document analysis at different points of time from 2007 until 2013. The results indicate that the agency’s primary scope for blogging is increasing its visibility and being perceived as an expert source of information among the media and specialized publics. To a lesser extent, the government agency was able to communicate with the general public and involve its stakeholders by posting content of recreational nature and even less to develop dialogue with them. The analysis indicates that over the years blogging has become highly specialized and has lost part of its relevance, as it has not contributed to increasing agency visibility in the media nor to promote a more participatory and transparent government agency. This study shows that strategic communication via blogging for a government agency is often a complex, full of dilemmas activity to engage with, and its real value is often overestimated.

The Organizational Blog as a Boundary Object: The Roles and Dilemmas of Government Agency Bloggers

This article looks at organizational blogger roles and how they both reflect and affect the way knowledge is communicated across department boundaries in a corporate blogging context. The blog is approached from a sociotechnical perspective, addressing and looking into the various roles in a community of practice and the enactment of the bloggers in a transparent context. Empirical examples of discourses at work in an organizational blog are highlighted, and the diverging roles and dilemmas of the blogging employees are discussed. People within the same organization have different goals in relation to the same technology, and the content of the blog and the blog comments are managed differently by the internal bloggers which feel empowered or disempowered. The article pinpoints roles of enactment in a socio-technical perspective through pointing out conflicting goals, roles and the resulting counter discourses and shows examples of how the group of bloggers with the shared narrative tradition is able to mobilize its members and create subgroups for appropriate blog behaviors and changing behavior.