BLOGGING FOR TRUST? An Examination of Executive Blogs From A Trust Perspective

Sammanfattning: In recent years, blogs, which can be described as online journals, have started to reach a broad audience. One type of blog emerging has been the executive blog, which is maintained by a person holding an executive position within a company. Theory suggests that one possible area of use for executive blogs is to build trust. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine whether executive blogs are used for building trust and if trust is created. A deductive research approach, mixed with some characteristics of an inductive approach, is adopted for the research. Based on trust theory, three executive blogs are examined to see if it is possible to find indications of executives signaling trustworthiness, site design characteristics signaling a trustworthy environment, and readers signaling perceived trustworthiness. By using a manual, qualitative data collection method, blogposts and comments are examined. The findings indicate that it is possible to find indications of executives signaling trustworthiness, site design characteristics signaling a trustworthy environment, and readers signaling perceived trustworthiness. Findings of how this is done are visualized in models. Suggestions for further research include examining executive blogs from a knowledge management perspective. Since no study found by the authors of this dissertation has examined executive blogs from a trust perspective, the results of this dissertation may be useful to shed light on this possible area of use. The results may also be useful for executives who are blogging as well as executives who plan to start blogging, with the aim of building trust on their blogs.