Corporate Blogs are fast emerging as new organizational tools for
marketing, building brand relationships and Customer Relationship
Management. This study has been conducted to analyse the ability of an
organization to use its Corporate Blog as an e-CRM tool. We attempt to
study the impact of brand communication (content type and volume),
hosted on an organizational blog, on its ability to induce consumer
engagement. Organizations can build relationships with their prospective
and current consumers through posts on a Corporate Blog, and encourage
them to participate by commenting on the blog, thereby stimulating
consumer engagement. The variation in the organizational objective
behind hosting each post on the blog is used to categorize the content
posted on the blog. An exploratory study enables us to deduce the
importance of content typologies in building a relationship with the
customer. We are able to identify three types of content typologies –
Organizational, Promotional and Relational. We further observe that
Relational content hosted by an organization is able to induce greater
volumes of consumer engagement (measured in terms of number of consumer
comments) than any other content typology. The analysis of dependency of
consumer engagement on the volume of content posted by the organization
indicates a positive correlation between number of posts and volume of
comments.
A Corporate Blog is an online repository serving as a virtual storehouse
of information, where organizations post content for consumer
consumption. Objectives include – providing a solution to exploratory
consumer browsing, aiding a consumer's quest for information, helping
consumers gain access to organizational promotional campaigns and
responding to controversies regarding organization/product.
This creates consumer involvement with this organizational endeavour
and eventually achieves consumer engagement for the organization, as the
consumer commences participation. Content categorization is done to
enable organizations to post consumer-relevant content to induce greater
consumer participation. Dependency analysis and regression are used to
study the relationship between volume of content posted by the
organization and its ability to stimulate greater consumer engagement.
This article addresses the need for hosting the appropriate content on
an organizational initiative, which, by matching consumer requirements,
helps develop a relationship between organization and consumer. The
scope of future work is outlined, wherein the knowledge capital created
through exchange with consumers can be mined to extract explicit
information, which can be leveraged from the organizational perspective
for diffusion and exploitation, for subsequent competitive advantage.
According to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2009 (Figure 1),
Corporate Blogging has moved up from the Trough of Disillusionment and
is now in the Slope of Enlightenment, inching slowly towards wide-scale
mainstream adoption as more and more benefits become visible.
Further information about this articles, please you check on Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management.
By Vandana Ahuja & Yajulu Medury
Repost by Acarre Community Media
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