Today my paper (Blog, Blogger and the Firm: An Analysis of Employee Incentives and Firm Policies) got accepted in WITS’06.
In this paper from the real world data, I find a functional form to predict hits to an employee blog from the inbound linkings to the posts and the types of posts (positive or negative for the firm). Using the functional form, I analytically illustrate: negative posts can benefit firms by getting more net positive traffic.
Speaking loosely, few negative posts may act as a catalyst to increase the web traffic/hits to a blog and if most of the other posts are positive then the readers may leave the employee’s blog with positive opinion about the firm. Implication of this result is that under conditions firms can do better by letting their employees to blog at their will, instead of restricting them to no negative blogging policy.
Before this, my solo author paper got accepted in AMCIS. I know all this is not a big deal. After all these are just conference publications, but hey, I made some start. This reminds me a famous quote of Abraham Lincoln, “I am a slow walker, but I never walk backwards“. BTW this is also the shibboleth of Johnnie Walker. 
Update: If you are reading this post, then probably you have searched for “WITS 2006″ on Google. This corroborates the motivation of my study- Blogs are ranked high on search engines and hence can reach (potentially influence) a large audience.
Rohit Aggarwal
