CRM in a Web 2.0 world: Using corporate blogs for campaign management

Abstract

Customer anxiety and cutbacks are the biggest factors influencing marketing budget allocation in recent times. The collaborative web or Web 2.0 as it is termed provides several low-cost opportunities for marketing and customer relationship management (CRM). While offering numerous touchpoints for interaction with current and prospective consumers, the web also offers access to vast amounts of consumer-generated data, which can give organizations access to the consumer thought process. This paper focuses on opportunities for usage of corporate blogs by organizations for campaign management, by using the organizational posts for delivery of promotional campaigns to consumers, and further extracting consumer-related information from the comments posted by consumers in response to these posts. The consumer comments can be mined to gauge consumer sentiment and to serve as a decision support system for better segmentation and response management. In this paper, we explore the usage of a corporate blog as a CRM tool to be utilized for contributing to the CRM functionalities of campaign management, customer service and support, and support to marketing communication and product development for aiding the organization in developing consumer targeting strategies appropriately.