Customer engagement is the interaction of customers with each other, a company or a brand. Online customer engagement often combines all three of those at once, enabled the ability of customers to connect with each other and share opinions much more easily and to more people than before the Internet. You’ll often hear marketers speak of the importance of online customer engagement, but why is it important and what does it mean exactly?
Due to the development of blogging software, forums, boards, chat, Twitter, etc. customers can very easily post opinions about your company and products in places where others can see and respond to them. This means that is much easier for customers to connect and share information about you than ever before. People are also much more likely to listen to feedback from their peers over marketing information from a company.
These same technologies make it much easier for companies to see what their customers are saying and to respond to it. Think of the feedback as free market research and the Internet gives you the opportunity to interact directly with the market research panel.
Online customer engagement is happening whether companies participate or not and without participation customers are shaping company’s brand reputations.
(photo by daisybush @ Flickr CC)
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