Chapter 6. Conclusion

Summary of the Study

The focus of this study has been the general public and its significance for organizations in a public relations context. The study questioned one of the fundamental principles of public relations, according to which organizations are advised to communicate only with those publics which have the potential to cause negative consequences. The general public, according to this principle, is considered insignificant and even nonexistent.

This study’s hypothesis was that new communication technologies have given the general public the power to cause direct negative consequences for organizations. To evaluate this hypothesis, I examined the October 2006 Edelman/Wal-Mart crisis caused by the “Wal-Marting Across America” blog. The new communication technologies component of my research were represented by the blogosphere. The organization which suffered negative consequences was represented by Edelman.

I designed a methodology for collecting, analyzing and identifying the most influential blog posts related to this case. The method involved both computational and manual approaches. The empirical part of the study involved automatically processing 11.935 web pages and 36.694 links, followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected relevant data. As a result, this study examined 156 blogs containing 201 relevant posts, connected by 1.548 links.

The results of the study demonstrated that Edelman suffered significant negative consequences which were caused by the blogosphere. The negative consequences included significant negative publicity in the blogosphere and mainstream media, as well as a negative public opinion on Edelman, formed through the discussion on the blogosphere.

It has been also demonstrated that the consequences cannot be isolated on a “per blog” basis and were caused by collective action on behalf of all the blogs involved in the conversation. It has been argued that the individuals and groups behind these blogs represent multiple publics and cannot be defined as one specific public according to existing theory. It has been shown that this mix of multiple publics can be described in the context of this study as the general public. Therefore, the hypothesis of this study was supported: new communication technologies, such as the blogosphere, have, indeed, given the general public the power to cause direct negative consequences for organizations. Chapter 5 described some implications these results may have for existing public relations theory.

Possibilities for Further Research

The Role of Public Relations on the Blogosphere

The results of this study offer a rather pessimistic view of the role of public relations in the blogosphere’s community. However, these results were based on a single case. An examination of the field’s participation in the blogosphere through analyzing other conversations might offer additional insight. However, identifying such instances may be not as straightforward due to the transparency problem, demonstrated in this study.

Completeness of Source Data

As it has been noted in Chapter 3, the main limitation of the method was the incompleteness of the source data. Collecting all relevant blog posts might be possible by expanding the set of search terms used to determine web page relevance. However, that might cause the initial result set to be too large to process manually. Therefore, a possibility for further studies involves improving the computation of the relevance of each post. If a better solution is found, it will be possible to automatically process much larger data sets. That would lead to the possibility of examining other conversations of the same type on more general topics, possibly, involving thousands, or even more blog posts.

Completeness of the Conversation Model

This study constructed a model of the conversation by representing all relevant blog posts as nodes in a connected graph, with the links between posts represented as graph edges. However, it has been shown that the conversation consists not only of blog posts, but, to a large extent, of comments the readers leave under some posts. Due to the size of this data, the solution, again, lies in a computational approach. Developing a program which might automatically extract all comment-related content from each web page and parse out the relevant data for each comment, would enable the generation of a much more complete and interesting model of a conversation – a model including both posts and comments. That would provide possibilities for analyzing the conversation in numerous ways.

Improving the Computation of the Set of Most Influential Blogs

The designed formula for calculating the set of most influential blogs used in this study may be improved. Considering that the set of all relevant blogs is represented as a graph, the same type of approach may be applied as that used to compute the relevance of web pages in a set of search results. In other words, the same principle, which is used to determine the order in which search results are displayed on Google, can be applied to determining the most influential blogs in a given collection of blogs. This approach could be based on the PageRank algorithm (Brin and Page, 1998), although its description is beyond the scope of this study.

Finally, this study, as well as the suggested improvements, can be used to develop a methodology for conducting research on blog conversations in general.