Readers’ letters, customer opinions and forums are things of the past when it comes to company marketing and communication. The era when companies communicated with their target audiences only through sales sites, commercial newsletters and email is long gone. The use of online forms and email addresses such as “contact@companyname.com” as a means of communicating with clients or potential clients is outdated.
The arrival of brand blogs and social networks heralds a new challenge for all companies.
In an increasingly cynical society, a change is taking place in the relationship between consumers and brands: today's proactive consumers are more responsible and more highly informed, and they subscribe less easily to the consumerist model. Today’s consumers are clued up about the Internet. They need and want to know more about the companies they deal with. They want to talk about their experiences. They want to be listened to.
The core values of a brand
Brands have to demonstrate the ways in which they differ from their rivals. What is the brand’s DNA? What added value does it bring to the current competitive environment?
Company values and strengths are not always visible on the web, and companies themselves are not sufficiently present when clients are looking for information.
Companies have to create the conditions in which this new, added value relationship with Internet users can take place.
At a time when real customer-focused marketing is coming to the fore, based on dialogue and the creation of value, brand blogs sustainably contribute to companies’ ambitions to position their brands and to be innovative in the field of conversational marketing.
Communicating a brand's strengths
By establishing a transparent online presence, companies aim to:
► establish and maintain their knowledge and status by highlighting their ethical and environmental values
► create and develop their digital identity
► illustrate their capacity for innovation
► make full use of their expertise and key activities
► highlight their competitive strengths
► improve the high-quality referencing of their brand
► develop a culture of "leveraging" their activities
► highlight customers’ experiences through what they represent
► increase the number of points of contact with Internet users.
The blog becomes an influential factor for the brand by:
- making the most of expertise and knowledge
- creating a richer, more direct, reciprocal and natural relationship with Internet users
- capitalising upon exciting and regular high quality multimedia editorial content (texts, photos, audio and video podcasts), which is up-to-date and focused on current brand offers and commitments.
Weaving a web on the web
In terms of customer relations, the challenge is huge for companies: their brand has to grab the attention of the consumer every time they go online. 
Communication has become direct and interactive. This is not about evolution of company communication methods. This is about R-evolution.
Today, brand blogs are the newly emerging commercial and marketing tool.
Each of our customers’ brands has seized this new channel as a means of communicating openly and directly with Internet users.
These brands communicate about:
► their operations in an open way: Marmara’s Top Expert operation
► their commitments: Opodo, partner in Tourism for Development, for ethical tourism
► their work and values: the SnavMed in Sri Lanka
► their response to the economic environment and their competitive added value: the Summer Magique prizes from Carrefour Voyages
► areas where they are leading the way: Training Eco-Entrepreneurs in Sustainable Development by the Institute for Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of Lille.
► their business innovations: tour-operating by GO Voyages
► their partnerships: Challenge Tourisme and the Prix Ditexpert