Bucking the Trend: An Agentive Perspective of Managerial Influence on Blogs Attractiveness

TL;DR

This paper explores how bloggers actively manage their content and network positions to attract more traffic, challenging traditional environmental influence theories in blog attractiveness.

Contribution

It introduces an agentive perspective highlighting bloggers' adaptive behaviors in content use to maintain and enhance their network positions.

Findings

Mindful content use correlates with higher blog traffic

Bloggers' strategic content management influences network positioning

Agentive behaviors can reverse nodal preferences in blog networks

Abstract

Blog management is central to the digitalization of work. However, existing theories tend to focus on environmental influence rather than managerial control of a blogs attractiveness at a microlevel. This study provides an agentive account of the adaptive behaviours exerted by the bloggers through the ways they use contents of their blogs to locate and harness their structural network positions of a blogosphere. We collated individual characteristics of 165 bloggers who blogged about economics, and then analysed the ways they maintained the contents of their blogs. We used network analysis and monomial logistic regression to test our model predictions. Our findings show that in contrast to less attractive blogs, bloggers who are mindful of their peers contents as a means of maintaining network positions attract a significantly higher level of traffic to their blogs. This agentive perspective offers practical insights into how nodal preferences can be reversed in blog management. We conclude the paper by discussing contributions to theory and future research.