“The first review of our latest Pulsar was on our table within three hours of its launch in Chennai thanks to bloggers,” Bajaj Auto VP (marketing-two wheelers) S Sridhar told ET

Being an avid biker myself and a blogger to some extent – I never did doubt the influence which review-blogs can have on potential bike buyers. More than blogging its the online biking communities – like the popular forum xBhp.com which can really do wonders for the image of a bike.

Each bike owner there is a passionate marketer of his brand and I’m sure Bajaj, Hero Honda and TVS would be following the forums their with quite some interest. The only thing which does blur the extent by which message boards and online communities influence a biker is the rural internet penetration of the internet in our country.

Performance oriented bikes (In our mileage conscious country, anything above 150cc’s is categorized under performance bikes) are the only ones which would actually be benefiting from such online activity. Both TVS and Hero Honda did quite a lot of activity for their ‘performance’ offerings – the Apache and CBZ Extreme had dedicated websites up. Apache tried to get a community going revolving around its fans – Apache Tribe.
Sub 125 cc bikes are pretty much ignored in these online communities and that is primarily because the youth like to associate themselves with power, style and speed.

Krishna Kant of ET nicely puts it, “Blog posts are now finding their way into the marketing strategies of motorcycle makers. What started as platforms to share passions and frustrations of bikers are now being tracked by corporates to fine-tune their offerings.”

Pulsar, CBZ and Apache have communities on Orkut with a couple of thousand members in it. In fact the Pulsar communities command more than 10,000 members. This actually made us start a WATBlog community on orkut too!

Well let us go back to xBhp.com. Two years back they had just around 5,000 members, but now they have in excess of 30,000 registered members and more than 2,00,000 posts – which is all User Generated Content. The site says it’s supported by Castrol – and it has been for more than a year. Kudos to Castrol for realizing the potential of this biking community at quite an early stage. Off late xBhp.com has seen a lot of sponsors coming up in the form of Nokia and Canon (Photography goes hand in glove with biking) and even content tie ups with the likes of Rediff and OkTataByeBye.com. Their Great Indian Roadtrip has also been captured in a blog.

Some biking blogs of note: Rearset, Biking the world, Indian2wheels, Motorcycle Diaries , The Real Me - Bunny Punia

Some biking groups: Bikenomads, 60kph, Rubber Smokin’ Angels

Other sites: StuntIndia, Indian Bike News, MBI - Motorcycle Bloggers International

Some personal blogs which are not totally dedicated to biking (but definitely worth a note): Vibhu, The Sagittarian Angel

Reading a positive bike review from a Biker who has in excess of 50,000 Kilometers of biking experience will definitely have more impact on a prospective buyer than seeing a TVC over and over again.

India 2.0 is definitely catching up, though Web 2.0 is still in a very nascent stage in our country – one can’t deny the shift happening.

[I might have missed out on mentioning some common blogs - apologies! Please mention your blogs as comments]

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