Vandana Ahuja
The 7 Functional Benefits of social media for the banking industry
The volumes of banking consumers who also happen to be on social media are too large to ignore, thereby making social media an interesting marketing platform for the banking industry. Social media offers 7 functional benefits for the banking sector. 1. Formation of an online…
Customer Intelligence for Sales, Marketing and CRM using Blogs
In these times of data overload, businesses are facing a data explosion as enormous volumes of consumer-generated content vie for organizational attention. Concepts of knowledge discovery and datamining, when applied to this voluminous data, can harness it for business intelligence, thus contributing to agile...
Blogs as Marketing Campaigns: Influencing and Mining Consumer Sentiment
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...
Blog Interactivity for Increased Brand Communication.
My research paper on Improving Corporate Blog interactivity for increased brand communication This paper focuses on the use of corporate blogs as tools which foster community interaction and organizational participation to build a congenial ecosystem where organizational elements co-exist with customers and deals with...
A Troubled General Motors Blogs to Connect With Customers
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...
The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2008
The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2008, lists Behavioral Economics, Mobile Robots, Surface computers, Augmented reality, Cloud Computing and Microblogging as the new upcoming technologies. As per a series of Gartner's studies, over the years, each technology passes through the phases of Technology Trigger…
162 Brands Use Social Media for Marketing
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...
Corporate 2.0: Some Companies Are Catching On–and They Are Fast!
The beauty of the use of the social web to track the voice of the customer became evident today, when in a couple of hours of putting the following post up on my personal blog, Marketology-Emerging Trends, I had Thomas Hoehn, Director Brand...
Web 2.0 Emerges Strong in McKinsey Survey
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…
Emergent Social Software Platforms: Some FAQs
Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0, is a term describing social software used in "enterprise" (business) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to...
Consumer Engagement and Technorati Authority: The Realm of Social Media
Research clearly indicates that organisations have accepted 2 facts- 1.Cultivating a respectable level of customer engagement is a strategic challenge. 2.The volumes and degree of consumer engagemnent will have long term implications for a firm. Let's take a look at social media's role in this…
Building Loyalty the Southwest Way: Let Your Customers Drive the Discussion
"It is the season to tell someone you'd love a Southwest giftcard" "Want to see the airport gate makeover, Southwest style?" "Do you like the nuts Southwest offers on it's flights?" "Need a job at SouthWest?" Log on to the Southwest Airlines page on Facebook,…
People-Centricity or Customer-Centricity?
India recently witnessed the launch of the Tata Nano-the "people's" car-The much awaited $2500 car for the common man. Tata Motors Limited is India's largest automobile company, with revenues of over $USD 7.2 billion. A car which made it to the TIME most important cars...
Achieving consumer engagement and building a brand relationship through interactivity
A 2005 article at "gapingvoid" on The Porous Membrane-why corporate blogging works talks about the internal and external environment of a company being seperated by a porous membrane. The more porous the membrane separating the internal organisational environment and the external 'customer' environment, the...
Cocreation-Participation From Passionate Customers
As questions arise on the degree of interest a consumer has in a company or brand enough to 'participate', I guess the issue of customer participation needs to be addressed separately. In an era where companies talk about the new form of value creation-Co-creation, where...
The CRM Forum, Mumbai, India, October 2007
I was invited to conduct a session on 'Social Media and the Customer Relationship' at the CRM Forum organised by Marcus Evans at the Le Meridien, Mumbai, 29th-30th October.The event was aimed at achieving business excellence through an integration of information, people, policies, processes...
Branded Online Communities Move to Television
Branded Online communities, set up by companies for Building brand equity are now tying up with the electronic media for greater visibility. As the interest of the youth increases in social networking, with humongous volumes of youngsters not only hanging around networking sites,...
Consumer-Generated Media and the Dissatisfied Customer
In an article on Comcast must die Bob Garfield on Ad Age, solicited ideas for a consumer jehad against digital and internet cable company Comcast!!! As a hapless consumer out to get back at an erring organisation, Bob's post garnered umpteen comments and suggestions....
Calculating the Marketing Value of a Social Network
Further to the discussions on Companies trying to use social networks for CRM, and a series of product/brand related networks springing up on these networking sites, let me try my hand at figuring out the marketing value of a social network. No. of members in...
Marketers Start To Use Social Networks as a CRM Tool
An ADAGE article on Marketers start to use social networks for CRM instead of ads strengthens my understanding on the uses of social media as a tool catering to customer engagement, loyalty and satisfaction. The key objectives of CRM, at the end of the...