Enterprise blogging in a global context : Comparing Chinese and American practices

Abstract

We present three studies that compare adoption and appropriation between China and the United States of BlogCentral, an internal blogging tool employed by a large global enterprise. We first analyzed 23 months of usage logs for users in both countries and found that compared to the U.S., Chinese users were much less active, with less activity and sparser user interaction. We then conducted 25 interviews and surveyed 213 bloggers in both countries to understand user motivations and behaviors of corporate blogging in more detail. The results show that Chinese employees use internal blogs for organizing personal work and short term team formation, unlike U.S. users who are driven more by the goal of sharing information to a broad community. The Chinese users were seeking (and not finding) greater social interaction and felt instead a sense of alienation from the global blogging community. We further identify a gap between Chinese users' requirement for local community and the existing global aspect of enterprise blogging tools. Lastly we discuss implications from the data analysis. Copyright 2011 ACM.