Corporate blogs as tools for consumer segmentation-using cluster analysis for consumer profiling

Abstract

The collaborative web or web 2.0 as it is termed, provides several low-cost opportunities for Internet Marketing and customer relationship management. 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 article focuses on exploring opportunities for usage of corporate blogs by organizations for Consumer profiling. This can be accomplished by extracting consumer related information from the comments posted by consumers in response to the posts hosted by organizations on a corporate blog. The consumer comments can be mined to gauge individual consumer sentiment, which can be used as a basis for consumer profiling. Data mining concepts of clustering and the nearest neighbor technique, can aid allocation of consumers to respective clusters, thereby enabling prediction of behavior of new consumers as and when they enter the system. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.