A process model of customer engagement on corporate blogging: An explorative study on technology blogs.

The purpose of this study is to explore and contribute to the understanding of customer engagement in corporate blogging. It particularly explores the customer engagement process of different technology blogs operated by Hitech companies. Based on both previous literature available and different techniques used by companies’ blogs to engage their users, this study intends to step even further and develop a customer engagement process model. This customer engagement model will elaborate and explore in detail how companies are engaging customers through corporate blogging. The process model includes 5 stages; content, interaction, immersion, evaluation, and satisfaction which will explore if how successful companies engage their users. The main idea behind this model is to explore and identify that how a random user or visitor of the blog gets engaged at first stage i.e. content and goes all the way to the last stage where a random user becomes a long term satisfied customer. However, it is not that each company goes through all these stages to engage customers. Therefore, this study by using an internet-based qualitative approach aims to explore famously and most visited corporate technology blogs and with the help of the proposed engagement model, identifying how successful companies can engage. The study chose 4 different famous technology blogs i.e. Google blog, Cisco blog, Engadget Blog, and CNet Blog. These blogs are famous for writing reviews and offering services about either their technological products or other companies' products which are trending in the global market. The findings indicate that not every company has to struggle for attracting and engaging incoming traffic on their blog websites. For example, a technological company like Google is considered a technology giant all over the world. Therefore, even if such companies do not put much effort into the contents or activities of their blog on the blogs to involve customers, they will still get more than a satisfactory number of users who end up as their customers. One of the important findings of this study is that although there have been many studies conducted on corporate blog marketing, however, there has been a lack of studies on technology blogs offering services of technological products. Thus this study attempts to explore further how previously companies were involved in customer engagement on their online forums to what extent they were successful. Furthermore, how different their strategies are from each other and what advantages big companies have due to their reputation in comparison with average rated companies. Lastly, the study will propose a process model for customer engagement which will include all major stages and components which can be helpful for customer engagement. After the implementation of all identified dimensions of customer engagement, the study found out that the content of a blog with technology products plays an important role in drawing the attention of the visitors and engaging them to achieve customer satisfaction and purchasing decision. Therefore, the study proposes a preliminary framework of blog content for customer satisfaction for future research