Using corporate blogs for supporting interactive marketing and CRM

Abstract

Corporate Blogs, Online communities and Social Networks are some tools offered by the newage collaborative web. Corporate blogging is being utilized by organizations for the core business processes of market sensing, customer acquisition and CRM. Our research focuses on the role a corporate blog can play in supporting the organizational functions of Interactive Marketing and CRM. We explore the dimension of interactivity in a Corporate blog which contributes significantly to building a brand relationship and stimulating consumer engagement and further move on to explore the usage of blogs for Customer Relationship Management. This is done by studying the ability of specific blog content typologies to generate greater consumer engagement and tracking the consumer responses in the form of consumer comments. These are subsequently subjected to the process of mining to gauge consumer sentiment and to serve as a decision support system for better segmentation and response management under the aegis of Campaign management in a CRM solution. A conceptual framework is developed for routing the consumer responses, clustered by creation of tags based on comment typologies to the appropriate CRM functionalities for actioning.