This paper focuses on the role of online communities in performing two important functions of CRM—building trust and enhancing perceived value in consumers. The paper moves ahead to study the features of online communities which make them part of the value delivering and enhancing mechanisms in organizations. The individual features ranging from co-presence, reciprocity and conviviality have well-defined roles to play in building relationships with customers and furthering the CRM goals of the organization.

The Internet represents an extremely efficient medium for accessing, organizing and communicating information. In the present scenario, interest in the Internet is unprecedented and its use in CRM and marketing is increasing exponentially (Robert et al., 1997). The World Wide Web resembles a huge forum where organizations can enter at will and visit the prospective consumers. The web possesses the fundamental characteristics of openness, informality, participation and interactivity—a combination of community and market place.

Content creation by consumers facilitating the flow of ideas and knowledge has given the corporates access to huge volumes of data which can be leveraged for decision making. Commonly and collectively called Web 2.0 tools, these new content-sharing sites, discussion and collaborative webspaces, and application design patterns or mashups are transforming the consumer web. They also represent a significant opportunity for organizations to build new social and web-based collaboration, productivity and business systems, and to improve cost and revenue returns (Platt, 2007). Web 2.0 is a business revolution in the computer industry caused by a move towards the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform (Reilly, 2007). Web 2.0 applications support the creation of informal users' networks facilitating the flow of ideas and knowledge by allowing the efficient generation, dissemination, sharing and editing/refining of informational content. Web 2.0 also appears to have a substantial effect on the consumer behavior and on new challenges facing strategists and marketers (McKinsey, 2008). Online communities, social networks, wikis, micromedia and folksonomies are some Web 2.0 concepts being used by businesses in the field of marketing, brand promotion and customer relationship management. A previous research study (Ahuja and Medury, 2008), showed contributions of corporate blogs to the CRM goals of an organization. With this background, we undertook a comparative analysis of three tools of the collaborative web to extract one tool, which we could pursue further in our exploratory studies. We further move on to develop a conceptual model for our proposed research on the basis of an in-depth literature review.

Marketing Management Journal, Online Communities, World Wide Web, Decision Making, Customer Relationship Management, Social Networks, Corporate Blogs, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention, Organizational Development Processes, Customer Information Management Systems, Customer Databases, Information Technology, Marketing Strategy, Business Communities.