Corporate blogs : what factors influence blog readers and comment providers to continue using blogs

Abstract

As blogs have become a new and significant way of distributing information, businesses and organizations have started looking for ways to exploit corporate blogs. With their recent evolution, little research has been conducted on the factors that influence blog readers and comment providers to continue engaging in corporate blogging activities. In this study, we analyze IT corporate blog users' motivations to continue using blogs based on an integrated technology acceptance model (TAM) and expectation confirmation model for the information technology domain (ECM-IT). Our findings suggest that confirmation, perceived usefulness, information quality and social norms are the main determinants of satisfaction, attitude and continued blog usage intention. Moreover, results indicate that some of the factors that influence users to continue using personal blogs do not apply to corporate blog visitors. Overall, our model explains 71% of the variance of continued blog usage intention.