Vandana Ahuja

When lacking consumer sentiment data, organizations resort to blanket promotional schemes, thereby not matching the true consumer expectations. Using a corporate blog as an eCRM tool, organizations can deliver promotional outbound messages to the consumers, and analyze the consumer responses on the blogs for effective campaign management.

Blogs are knowledge repositories which can be used as decision support tools. Every time an organization posts a message on its blog, the consumer receives some benefit through the posts—be it details about an organizational achievement, a promotional message about a product, request for feedback or response to a controversy. As these benefits increase, consumers increase their interaction with the organization, thereby offering more information about themselves. The consumer thought process as reflected in the comments under the posts is knowledge capital which can be mined to extract explicit information which can be leveraged from...

General Motors is celebrating its 100th anniversary, facing the future with ledger books bleeding red. As it asks the U.S. Congress for billions in low-interest loans and considers a merger, the troubled car maker is remaking its strategy, in part with the help of its customers.

One of the ways GM is interacting with its customers is through its corporate blog.

A corporate blog is a good answer to exploratory consumer browsing. It uses a soft-sell approach and is a cost-effective way to inject traffic in an accountable and traceable way. The key idea is to cater to a long-term brand impact. The methodology is simple: Attract consumers and motivate regular visits through appropriate content.

As an online web space, where you...

The variety of social media delivery mechanisms is increasing in leaps and bounds-Social Networking, Corporate Blogging, Online videos, Facebook Fan pages, Widgets, Microblogging, Twittering, Second Life, YouTube and Flickr are being used for marketing, branding and consumer engagement.

In this context, Peter Kim's 162 brands using social media for marketing makes an interesting reference list.

Also worth reading:
An insider's guide to using Flickr for marketing.

A McKinsey survey on usage of Web 2.0 tools in organisations has some interesting results.

1.Tools they looked into:Web services, Blogs, RSS, Wikis, Podcasts, Social networking, Peer to Peer and Mashups.

2.Out of the agendas for adoption, focussing on interactions with customers has emerged as an important objective.

3.Adoption of Web 2.0 has changed the way organisations interact with their customers and suppliers.

4.Getting customer participation in product development, improving customer services, customer aquisition and enabling customer interaction were the core utilities of these tools in the ' Interfacing with Customers' category.

5. Adoption of managerial methods to encourage adoption and reduce barriers to these tools made sense in a competitive scenario where adopters of these technologies would end up with a decided competitive edge.

6. While these tools are being used for internal and external communication, usage for co-...