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政 治 大
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Interactions Between Bloggers
ABSTRACT
Web 2.0 applications facilitate various adaptations of blogs on many different
areas. Bloggers who have blog publications and financially depend on the blog are
referred to as professional bloggers in this study. As blogging becomes a social
trend, a phenomenon, and more – a profession, there should be a rule or a guideline,
and relationship marketing is suggested by the author. Guided by relationship
marketing, with the definition extracted from various literatures, the study is based on
the structure of Christopher, Payne & Ballantyne (1991) – the relationship marketing
ladder of customer loyalty. The purposes of the study are to examine the importance
of interaction in the blogger-blog reader relationships, and most significantly, to test if
relationship marketing can fit-into the blogosphere.
Adopting a two-phase, sequential mixed method, this study applied both
qualitative and qualitative research tools. In the first phase, a pretest survey was
conducted to serve as the base for further research. In the second phase, focus group
discussions were carried out to explore more insights of blogs, blogging, and the
target bloggers, Wan Wan & Queen, from blog readers’ perspective. At last, a
final-found survey was conducted to collect more data for testing the hypotheses and
feasibility of the research framework.
To conclude, interaction is indispensible in managing blogs. Interactions and
blog readers’ expectations toward the blog influence their satisfaction with the blog,
and further affect the development of loyalty to spread word-of-mouth. The
suggestions for further research including studying from different perspective,
adopting longer time span, collecting a larger sample, categorizing bloggers, and
implementing behavioral research for business use.
