Your space or mine?: Community management and user participation in a Chinese corporate blogging community

Abstract

In this paper, we present a case study of MoCo Blogs, a publicly accessible, corporate blogging site, which is hosted by a large telecommunication company in China. We study the design and operation of the site from two aspects: (1) how community owners/administrators guide and coordinate blogger activities to meet the company's business goals; and (2) how participants respond to management guidance and act on their own incentives. Through the analysis of three data sources: 17-month activity logs with 1,046 bloggers and 10,291 blog entries, 4-month online participatory observation, and in-depth interviews, we present two key findings. First, we describe three key operational strategies employed by the site administrative team to encourage user contributions and manage content across the organizational boundaries. Second, we examine how these strategies directly influence user participation. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings on an organization's roles in corporate social communities. © 2012 ACM.