Customer Relationship Management

Given the fact that blogs were probably one of the early entrants that started a social conversation over the net, it was evident that people harnessed its capabilities before exploring other social networking tools. Blogs provided a platform where a person can simply pen down his/her own thoughts on any topic of their interest. As different blog platforms started emerging and more internet users got hooked on it, a new wave emerged into the blogging arena where experts on various fields started to write blogs on specific topics. Another reason that attracted lot of attention of internet users to blogging is the monetization potential of it. 

As blogging matured in terms of capabilities provided by different platforms, organizations started to realize the opportunities and challenges of this platform. Hence, the next obvious step was to use this platform as one of the connectors to the existing CRM systems.

Before I start on how blogs could be leveraged by traditional systems, I would like to point out certain blog characteristics that can be used as a filtration criteria by an organization to identify which external blogs source should be added to feed list:

1. Number of followers: Most of the blog platforms provide with a follower feature where one can identify how many people are visiting it more frequently.
2. Search Engine Page Rank: On what position on average a blog comes up while searching.
3. Comments: Having number of followers is one parameter but a more active blog is one that invites lot of comments for each blog.
4. The blog owner's profile: This could play a vital link in identify customer advocates for your brand. If the owner is well renowned then it is highly probable that many more external forums, web sites, magazines would have link to the blog.
5. Tags: This is the feature through which one can identify how many related tags are mostly on an average that can be used by the organization.

Now, from the capabilities provided by most CRM systems, some of them could leverage blogs in one or more of the following ways:

1. Contacts: Identifying important blog owners and adding them into the contact list and taking it further based on the blog content.
2. Product Catalog: The blogs data could be used as a possible addition to the product catalog in terms of the review/feedback
3. Activity/Service Request:  The blog could be used also as a source for taking pro-active action in the form of activity/service request in case it is an existing customer who is not satisfied.

Having talked about various aspects of blogs, if I compare blogs with other networking tools, the blog platform can be put into a more formalized kind of social networking category. Given the fact that many end users are now more attracted towards micro-blogging and forums as these have more active conversations, it is highly likely to generate more data and thus more junk.

Whereas, I think blogs could be used in a more intelligent manner to provide fruitful outcomes as the source feeds and active users would be less compared to others. Moreover, on the collaboration front with customers, blogs will be a better platform as certain customers could be identified to create user generated content to write in detail on what they would like to share about the brand/products/services in public. Would love to hear some real examples of using blogs in the CRM context!

About the Author

Nishith Gupta is an Associate Consultant with Enterprise Solutions. His experience includes working on developing custom built CRM applications for a leading telecommunications provider, with focus on customer retention & campaign management. Nishith will blog on Customer Retention, Social CRM and Campaign Management.