Customer engagement (CE)=  function of (customer service, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty). Input is the service whereas the output is the satisfaction which results in loyalty and thus the brand equity of the product or service takes flight.

Nowadays urban India has started buying stuff online quite frequently. Young people are now much more trusting about the products sold online. They are an impatient lot and require a lot of efforts through innovation, differentiation to keep them loyal to your product. What better place than through social networking websites because they are perennially accessible there.

The 4 most important things to engage customer are:

Confidence: the customer should have the confidence about the quality of the product.

Integrity: the company reputation should be ethical

Pride: the user should be proud about the product. He should not hide it from his friends or peers

Passion: the customer should feel the qualities of the product. E.g. A Harley Davidson rider. The user should be in ‘love’ with the product

It is very difficult to make any of the factors possible through social media networks. Online inter-customer engagement is a recent social phenomenon that came about through the wide diffusion and adoption of the internet in western societies during the late 1990s. Offline CE predates online CE, the latter is a qualitatively different social phenomenon unlike any offline CE that social theorists or marketers are familiar with.

Online communities on the various blogs or websites are divided in the following types:

• A particular product category (cell phones, chocolates, soft drinks)

• A particular brand (Harley Davidson, Spykar) or

• A pure dot-com company’s give a vast array of offerings (Baazee, Amazonhttp://www.amazon.com).

People also engage online in communities that do not necessarily revolve around a particular product, but serve as meeting or networking places, for instance on MySpace. The people in one’s MySpace friend’s list do not necessarily all share a single consumption habit, although they often do.

People’s online engagement with one another has brought about both the empowerment of consumers and the opportunity for businesses to engage with their target customers online. This is especially for the Screenager type people who are continuously online