Corporate blogging in Spanish companies. Design and application of a quality index (ICB)

Abstract

Blogs have strengthened its position as an online communication tool to increase the dialogue between organizations and their publics, and this thanks to their interactive capacity and easy use. Although blogs didn’t enjoy the popularity and swift penetration of social networks, Spanish companies are gradually incorporating this channel to their Public Relations plans. Thus, it becomes increasingly interesting to develop a quantitative index allowing determining the degree of compliance to excellence criteria. This paper aims to identify the main factors in order to value the quality of a corporate blog, describes the design of the evaluation index and, later, applies this index to study the corporate blogs of the main Spanish companies in order to unveil how they are exploiting its many advantages.