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 intelligent enterprises.

I experiment with discovering actionable knowledge from a Corporate Blog, to aid decision making. I treat the 'social' aspect of a blog as an attribute which enables it to serve as an application which can form a bridge between the consumer and the organization.

Customer Intelligence Tool for CRM

Further to my article on Blogs as marketing campaigns, where I had considered comments as sets of opinionated text, with the assumption that the text (each set of comments on a single post) is related to a single issue or item, I propose a system of allowing consumers who comment on an organizational blog, to tag their comments.

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 the organizational perspective for diffusion and exploitation and subsequent competitive advantage.

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 the right combination of interactive features on a blog to elicit greater brand proliferation.

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 can post content about your organization, a blog attempts to change the flow and balance of information and is fast emerging as a marketing tool that helps shape consumer perceptions by presenting a unified mass-market branding image to counter dissenting opinions and alternative sources of information and messages.

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

1. Technology Trigger
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations
3. Trough of disillusionment
4. Slope of enlightenment
5. Plateau of productivity
   during its lifecycle

Gartner’s own summary is this:

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.

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 Communications and New Media, Kodak, commenting on my post and thanking me for the mention. ... Well, tracking online sentiment through user generated content does appear to be a strong point with them.

Here goes ...

"Over 35 examples of organisations using social media to build consumer engagement

35+ Examples....
Apple, Kodak and Sony are other corporates which could have made it to the list."

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-creation may soon evolve into usage for driving innovation.

The full report-Building the Web 2.0 enterprise

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 traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, this generation of software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.(sourced from Wikipedia)

Despite being beneficial to organisations, the early adopters to these platforms are not very high.Professor Andrew McAfee at Harvard Business School has compiled an exhaustive list of the frequent causes of organisational dilemmas towards adoption of emerging social software platforms.Primarily relevant to the set of organisational setups who are still very skeptical about the possible chances of misuse of these platforms by employees.

A must read-
Some questions you might get asked

Professor Mc Afee's research on enterprise 2.0 is a reference place for organisations attempting to weave these social software innovations into the corporate setup.

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 entire talk about consumer engagement.

Mario Sundar at the Linkedin Corporate Blog lists the top fifteen corporate blogs on the basis of their technorati authority.

Technorati authority is a measure of the number of blogs linking into the blog under discussion. In other words, technorati authority is indicative of-

1. Popularity of a blog as in terms of volume of readers.

2. Volume of user generated content about a blog, with those many other users having generated content regarding that particular organisation, brand or product.

For the purpose of this discussion on corporate blogs, let us assume that a significant number of visitors to the blogs in question are customers-prospective and current.