An Examination of the Corporate Social Responsibility Discourse in the Blogosphere

In this paper we utilize social network analysis to examine the interaction patterns between corporate blogs devoted to sustainability issues and the blogosphere, a clustered online network of collaborative actors. By analyzing the structural embeddedness of a prototypical blog in such a virtual community, we show the potentials of online platforms for engagement with an increasingly socially and ecologically aware customer base. It is furthermore demonstrated that consumer involvement via sustainability blogs is a valuable new practice for communications and brand management and opens new horizons for communicating corporate social responsibility issues to key constituencies online.