What can knowledge management processes and tools do for corporate marketing?
Traditional marketing communications methods include:
- Direct mail, email, and voicemail messages
- Web sites
- Links from other web sites
- Conference calls and virtual meeting rooms
- Periodicals and publications
- Meetings, events, tradeshows, conferences, seminars, and training sessions
- Audience surveys and focus groups
- Advertising
- Public relations and analyst relations
- Interviews, news stories, and published articles
Using Web 2.0 technologies often associated with knowledge management, corporate marketing can better engage with both employees and customers. Here are ten ways to do so:
- Threaded discussions
- Internal: Allow employees to collaborate with one another, ask and answer questions, and share information.
- External: Encourage customers to help one another, suggest products and services, and engage with each other. Example: HP IT resource center forums
- Social software
- Internal: Allow employees to have similar functionality to what they are used to externally. Encourage them to gain experience in using these tools.
- External: Encourage customers to build networks built on products and services, interests, preferences, etc. Examples: Facebook, Digg,Technorati
- Bookmarks and tags
- Internal: Allow employees to bookmark their favorite sites.
- External: Encourage customers to tag their favorite company-related sites. Example: del.icio.us
- Community spaces
- Internal: Allow employees to collaborate on topics of interest.
- External: Encourage customers to collaborate on company-related topics. Example: Yahoo! Groups
- Portals
- Internal: Allow employees to interact with a single site which integrates content from multiple sources.
- External: Encourage customers to visit a single site for all of their support needs. Example: HP IT Resource Center
- Wikis
- Internal: Allow employees to create and collaboratively edit their own content pages.
- External: Encourage customers to collaboratively edit community pages. Example: IBM wikis
- Webcasts and webinars
- Internal: Communicate useful marketing information to employees to help them better do their jobs.
- External: Communicate useful marketing information to customers to help them better understand company offerings. Example: HP webcasts
- Blogs
- Internal: Give employees a voice, solicit their inputs and suggestions, and make executives more approachable and real.
- External: Communicate useful information to customers with a personal face to build credibility and increase engagement. Example: HP blogs
- Podcasts
- Internal: Allow employees to receive communications in a way which is more convenient for them.
- External: Encourage customers to subscribe to receive audio communications on a regular basis. Example: HP podcasts
- Videos
- Internal: Allow employees to record and upload their own videos to share information, create excitement, and emulate YouTube.
- External: Encourage customers to view product and service videos to learn more about offerings in an appealing way. Example: HP videos
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