(Un)believable blogs : Blogs, Skepticism and Product Reviews

• Blogs (short for "web logs") are websites, owned and written by individuals ("bloggers"). While most blogs serve merely as a way for individuals to record and report their thoughts and activities and have little commercial or organizational impact whatsoever, a smaller number enable those with more expertise to commentate on advanced and specialized phenomena, subjects, industries, products, and services. In doing so they reach very large audiences and become very influential. Blogs have become important marketing communication devices in recent years, because, used effectively, they can be very helpful relationship management tools. Blogger credibility in particular is of crucial importance from a communication perspective -recent research has demonstrated strongly that blogger credibility plays a positive role in relational trust. It begins to answer the issue: to what extent are readers skeptical about the content of blogs? This is an important question, because, if general skepticism is low, then blogs will prove to be effective ways of communicating with broad publics. If it is high, then marketing communicators need to factor this into their use of blogs as tools of communication and persuasion. In this research, a scale to measure advertising skepticism (STA) is adapted to a blogging context. Belief in a communication is a function of the both the source of that communication (source credibility) and the specific content of the communication (content credibility). Because the STA scale focuses primarily on the informational aspect of advertising, we integrate this into a more generalizable causal model of skepticism toward blogging. We argue that an individual's overall skepticism toward blogs impacts on their skepticism toward the information contained in blogs, and the extent to which they believe blogs are credible. This in turn influences the frequency with which they then read blogs. This structure is then tested empirically.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Industrial Marketing

Industriell marknadsföring

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)