Understanding the Business Value of Social Media Marketing

Last week David Carter, Founder and CTO of Awareness, provided insights about how the field of social media marketing is maturing. We are a long way from completely understanding the business results for social media efforts and an even longer way from fully integrating them into a single-source set of marketing metrics. But real progress is being made in understanding and communicating business outcomes.

Awareness has a new ebook, with the lengthy but descriptive title “The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing.” That is, after all, what we as marketers want to do, and we have to link our efforts to actual revenue generation, not just to having a bunch of people who like us! This is the funnel; the entire book is well worth reading. Note that they start with what is essentially segmentation. Their definition of a social profile is the “aggregated interests, comments, and overall behaviors of a fan, follower, or RSS subscriber to a branded social network platform such as a brand’s Facebook fan page, Twitter profile, or blog.” The definition alone is challenging; it requires a full view of the person’s behaviors in social channels which is a big order for the social media metrics capabilities of most firms at this point. However, in order to influence, the marketer must first listen to what the customer is saying. That’s a keystone of SMM strategy.
Next, the marketer must have clear goals that impact the business. Those can range from qualifying and nurturing sales leads to providing excellent customer service and more. Then there are a variety of engagement strategies that marketers can use including engaging in conversation and collecting feedback. Most marketers will find that they need to use all these engagement strategies at one time or another. Which they use will depend as much on the stage of the customer’s relationship with the firm (customer lifecycle) as on the marketing campaign or on the product. This all fits nicely with the organization of Awareness’s social media hub software—publish, manage, measure and engage.

In his presentation he talked about these stages:
• The first is a robust content marketing strategy, deploying (and “repurposing”) your content widely across the web. A large firm will need a robust content management system to both facilitate and control the content marketing process.
• It is essential that the marketer first listen, then engage in the conversation the customer wants to have—not the product-oriented conversation the marketer wants.
• Collecting feedback required monitoring and, carefully done, leads to the social profile.
• Then measure results that can be linked to business outcomes.
The presentation represents reflections on the state of our art from a respected practitioner. Take a look.

My Slides from speaking to Harvard's Social Media Marketing class

View more presentations from Awareness Inc.

In it he asks the question that all marketers must keep asking themselves—for their corporate SMM strategy as a whole and for each campaign they run: what stage of the customer lifecycle do we need to impact? If you buy my argument that all SMM is lead generation, then the practical question becomes “what is the definition of ‘conversion’ for this particular SMM activity?” Is it a fan for our Facebook page, a qualified lead for our sales force—what exactly? Can we link it directly or indirectly to our SMM activities? Those two questions help focus the mind of the social media marketer.

It also leads me to my favorite quote from the ebook. Jeremiah Owyang says, “Don’t give engagement data to executives, as it doesn’t measure the actual effect on business goals.” Ouch; I wonder how many of us have made that mistake.

Social media marketing is moving in the direction of proving its actual business value. It has a way to go, however, and all of us should play an active role in moving it forward.

Using Facebook to Drive Traffic

My firm assumption is that marketers are using Facebook to accomplish something, and hopefully they are clear about precisely what that is—good objectives! I’ve had several questions lately that have caused me to think about how marketers are using their Facebook Wall pages (assuming the wall is the most trafficked) and what they are using for landing pages.

So I did a small and totally unscientific survey of some of the sites I follow. Some of it is food for thought; all is interesting. In the interest of disclosure, all my entry points came from searching ‘name facebook.’ Am I the only one who can’t find anything on Facebook itself?

I’ve written about Coke’s social media strategy.
Wall Page. Their main link leads me to a big happy Coke logo; when I click through it invites me to be a fan. No thank you; closing that out leads me to the main Coke page. Easy to get from there to wall page. Took me several clicks but interesting, so I’m not annoyed. Wall is completely fan posts; see nothing from Coke at the moment. You might find it worth reading their House Rules.
Landing Page. None on wall at the moment because they are fan posts. Feeds page has lots of Twitter from the UK at the moment that take you to an offer page on the Diet Coke UK website. The Coke page seems to be the main page for corporate links; see for example their recycling page on the Living Positively site. There’s much going on here; all seems to be well thought out.

I’ve also written about the Pepsi Refresh program, which seems to be Pepsi’s sole communications focus at the moment.
Wall Page. The main link takes you to the Pepsi Refresh Project page. This is a marketing campaign, not a corporate site per se. On the Wall page(s) they have covered all the bases; Pepsi Only, Fans Only, Pepsi + Fans. I’m a bit slow to catch on; I’ve looked several times before understanding this option for corporate fan pages. Try it out and see what I mean. Interesting!
Landing Page. On the Pepsi Only Wall page, most of the current posts go to either to an update message on the Refresh Everything site or to a YouTube video. Some link back to the Pepsi Refresh Project page on Facebook—think about that!

Intuit has a lot of web savvy.
Wall Page. Actually, they have several Facebook pages. I choose the Small Business Spot because I like what they’re doing with it. They have a small business grants program—interesting. When I looked at that wall page it was a mix of Intuit posts, a warning from a user about incompatibility with Chrome, and some user questions. Interestingly enough, the same coffee-drinking user who warned about Chrome compatibility is answering other user question(s). Nice! Lots of questions about taxes; Intuit seems to be responding. One frustrated user says customer service on Facebook is better than in the telephone call center. All in all, a lot that Intuit can learn here and people seem to be getting their issues resolved.
Landing Page. Links from Intuit posts go to their blog, their community, their Kiva page and probably more, depending on the message. This was the first corporate page where I saw wall posts all post linking to the corporate Facebook page, in this case the Small Business Spot page on Facebook. Offers and links there take visitors to the Intuit small business website.

I’ve written about Legal Zoom also.
Wall Page. Can a bunch of lawyers carry on a good conversation? This site says they can! The main link takes me to their Notes page. I find that uninspiring, but they have a reason; pushing Start-A-Business month. Their wall page is a nice mix of LegalZoom and fan posts. Many fan posts are quite complimentary—amazing! Also some cute lawyer-related stuff like a link to a Hollywood Reporter article about the lawyer stationed backstage at the Oscars. Great content strategy!
Landing Page. As you might guess, their content strategy results in links to many sites. Some, like Inc magazine, appear to be partners in support of small business. Let’s hear is for these lawyers—they are being positive, supportive and interesting!

The San Diego Zoo is one of my all-time favorites in many ways. Its website ranks up there with the best of corporate sites.
Wall Page. The main link takes you to their wall pages. They use the same Zoo Only, Zoo + Fans and Fans Only set of pages.They have a lot of happy visitors and lots of adorable baby animals to talk about. What's not to like? The Zoo uses a polar bear as their icon for administrator posts. Wonder if they are thinking about that after SeaWorld?
Landing Pages. Their links go everywhere—pages, blogs, live webcams; they have great content. How can fans not like a baby panda or a little tapir? Their website is engaging and using Facebook the way they do creates more engagement as well as driving a great deal of traffic to the website. The zoo has had a family of blogs for quite awhile. They are, of course, on Twitter, Tweeting away with happy visitors and about zoo animals. There is a link on the Twitter page to the Live Panda Cam. They have a platform and are making excellent use of it. Look at how they cross post on blogs.

I started this with a misperception, and I just left it there. It’s not necessarily a wall page; it can be a series of wall pages. It is not a landing page. A vibrant content strategy leads to many links to many kinds of content both on the corporate site and to related content on other sites. All keep the fan base growing and engaged.

The major take away is that there is no one right way of using a Facebook fan page. It depends on your strategy and the way you want to interact with fans and visitors. Whether it’s baby animals or lawyers being amiable, it’s all about 2-way communication and dealing with customer questions and issues. The five above have all gotten the message!

Social Shopping--Another Trend for 2010?

If I had added one more trend to Monday’s list, it would have been social shopping, so I decided to end the week with a summary. I’ve written a lot during the holiday shopping season about good uses of social media by retailers and results from the season confirm the importance of social media to ecommerce. According to Internet Retailer:

Another trend that emerged from the holiday season is the growing importance of online social networks, blogs and forums. Among consumers researching and buying holiday gifts online, 28% said social media influenced a purchase decision, compared with 11% who said they were guided by a customer-generated product review, 7% by an expert review and 6% by a Facebook message, comScore says. Observed comScore’s (chairman Gian) Fulgoni, “We are getting our first real glimpse at the impact social media will play on commerce as we enter the next decade.”


Earlier in the fall the site SheSpeaks asked about brand-related activities and found a lot of it on both social networks and Twitter. Other 2009 data from SheSpeaks found 55% of women they interviewed logging into social networks multiple times each day; 72% log in at least once a day. That’s huge!

The strategic use of social media by retailers is important, but the precise definition (if there is one!) of social shopping (or social commerce) is more narrow. It is an attempt to allow shoppers to bring onto the web some of the “social event” feeling of shopping in the mall with a friend. That may be an important part of the physical retail shopping experience that Internet retailers can provide on the web going forward.

As I’ve looked at the space, there are two basic ways to do that:

• Join one of the shopping sites that supports social experience. There are a lot of them and more being added. ThisNext is a good example of a site where a merchant can get a free tool that allows visitors to post a product to the site, where it joins the pool for online discussion. They have an application called Shopcast that encourages consumers to add ThisNext content widgets to their own personal pages. The common thread in this type of site is that retailers must encourage shoppers to list products on the site. Another set of sites appear to feature the products of partners; Couture Society is one of those.

Actually, it’s rather hard to find out precisely how retailers get products included; maybe that’s intentional, maybe it’s because the space is still new.

• Add social shopping functionality to your site. Clearly, this would be the more expensive option, but it gives retailers control. I wrote about Decision Step earlier in the year. BazaarVoice is another firm that offers a robust set of social applications. These, obviously, work on your own site and the merchant doesn’t have to rely on a third party site.

Be it social media in general, or social shopping in particular, interaction between shoppers seems to be the direction in which ecommerce is moving. Does it create a new type of business model, or is it just value-added to the existing ecommerce model? For now, I think it’s the latter, but that could change. It certainly is a part of Web 3.0 – the open ecosystem that is gradually replacing the walled-garden sites of the early Internet.

Internet marketers should keep an eye on what is going on in this space. It seems to offer merchants a way to reach out—often to the friends of friends (“birds of a feather”) who might also find the offering attractive. That’s cost-effective customer acquisition!

Tracking Coke on Social Media

While doing research for the best practices article yesterday, I noticed that Starbucks had pushed Coke out of first place in one of the listings—engagement, I think. I don’t pay much attention to the “who’s on first” kind of lists; I’m interested in looking for strategy. Coke, though, seems even less amenable to online social media than Starbucks, although I did write about an experiment they did in Second Life quite awhile ago. In any event, I checked it out.

The first thing I found was that there are over 1,000 Coke pages on Facebook. Lovely for them, but I was looking for their official fan page. I found it, and it’s impressive in design and content; clearly not a DIY effort! They have 4,107,432 fans, which sounds like a pretty good second place! More interesting is the integration of customer effort into their Facebook presence. Coke marketing people were paying attention to what customers were saying—and the rest is history. Check out this video for what they did and how they did it!

Again, lovely for them for co-opting their customers into their own marketing, but I looked a little further. It didn’t take much effort to find that they have a year-long promotion, launched in Madrid on New Year’s day. The three winning adventurers are already off on Expedition 206. The header pretty much says it all; the mission is to seek and share stories of happiness.


It’s worth spending some time on this site. The three young people are delightful and seem to be having a wonderful time 3 days into their excellent adventure. I was especially interested in the ways to follow it. The last similar thing I followed was a National Geographic deep sea project; those reports came to me by email, which suits my lifestyle. No email here that I can see. You can download the widget, which looks like fun. You can get posts on 4 of the major social networks; MySpace and Twitter are obvious; don’t know where Yahoo! puts it, although the link took me to my account sign-in. If you’re not a fan of Facebook Connect, you should click on the Facebook link and see what it tells you. See how fan pages can get a lot of fans quickly?

There should be a word on Facebook privacy (or lack thereof), which has once again been in the news recently. Facebook Connect brings in all your friends. When I went directly to Coke’s Facebook fan page, I got an interesting privacy notice from it. By clicking through to the page I gave Coke permission to access my Facebook information. Ok, but I do appreciate being made aware.

You have no privacy on Facebook; “get over it.” As individuals, be aware of what information you are putting out there for the world to see. As marketers be aware of what you are asking your customers to do—and be transparent about it! As long as you don’t put data or content out there that you wouldn’t be happy for your mother—or your best customer—to see, this is good fun!

Ok, so most of us aren’t Coke, and we can’t do a 206-day global promotion (actually, most of us probably don’t need to!). Is your business doing something that you’d like for people to know about and to follow—a green project is a good candidate these days. So is an event you sponsor. As is a cause you partner with.

On a smaller scale, I’m willing to bet that most of us have things we should be sharing with our customers—good things, innovative things—things that build our brand, whether it’s global or local!

Augmented Reality meets Social Media meets the Christmas Holidays!

Augmented Reality has been getting a fair amount of attention lately. As Business Week puts it, brands are looking for new ways to engage their customers. Dorian Benkoil, writing in Poynter Online, has more intriguing examples and visions of the future. Can you believe the USPS now has an augmented reality app that lets you identify the correct box size for your item? Even more to the point, can you believe they have an excellent video that shows how it works? Since I don’t consider the USPS a hotbed of innovation, I found it difficult! Watch the video and see for yourself.

Stella Artois, the Belgian beer brand, announced an ecard yesterday that seems to combine the best features of AR and social media. Of course it’s a Christmas card! And it hits all the right notes, especially for the social media enthusiast!









• It’s fun and engaging.
• It’s carefully thought out. To get full benefit the recipient needs a webcam or smart phone to read the digital marker. If there’s not one available, it is viewable as a Flash ecard.
• It’s cause-related marketing. Each card sent will result in a tree saved in an ecologically-important area in South America.
• A live webcam in Hyde Park shows a tree with a light for each card sent. The goal is 1 million cards, 1 million trees saved, by Christmas.



Their video shows how the card works. If you view it with a webcam, you can move the picture around and you can move the snowflakes by blowing into your pc's mic.

What’s not to like about all of that? Congratulations to Stella Artois for the strategy and Bright Spark Digital for the execution! It’s not only cool technology, the spirit fits the season!

Brand Attitudes and Behavior ARE Affected by Social Media!

The headline in the IAB newsletter says that “product chatter is getting louder on social media.” The article in MediaPost quotes data from a study by Performics that includes:
• 30% of their respondents had learned about a product, service or brand on a social site.
• 25% go directly to the site after hearing about it on a social site.
• 44% of respondents have recommended and 39% have discussed a product on Twitter.
• 46% have talked about or recommended a product, service or brand on Facebook.



Ok, so consumers are talking. Does it make a difference? The 2009 Razorfish FEED report says it does. That’s a big majority who say they are influenced!




How? The Razorfish data confirms that brand activity on the web can influence all stages of the consideration process. Attending events is powerful. Participating in a brand-sponsored contest or contest is even more so. These data also give support to the argument that social media have differential impact at different stages in the consideration process. Contests and sweepstakes have more impact on awareness; brand events have more impact on actual purchase. Wonder why the purchase impact. . .is it that brand events provide more content/information? Perhaps, but for sure the implication is that different types of promotion, even on the same platforms, may have impact at different stages. That’s important!





A study from Cone, recently reported by eMarketer, emphasizes the positive impact on brand attitudes that comes from brand interaction.

Razorfish says that the bottom line is: “Digital brand experiences create customers” (p. 11). Can you look at these data and doubt the truth of that statement?

Engagement Lessons from Successful Brands

An interesting customer engagement study has been sitting on my desktop since late summer and it’s long since time to pay attention. The study, by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group ranks the top 100 brands in terms of customer engagement. You can see the ranking and download the full report here.

Starbucks and Dell are number 1 and 2—no surprise there. They interviewed some other high-ranking sites, SAP at 9 Toyota at 21—about best practices, presumably to get a perspective from different industry sectors. Each of the highly engaging brands has several best practices to suggest and they are worth reading the full report. I picked out one from each that struck me as universally applicable:

Starbucks identifies people throughout the organization to be the liaison with the social media program—to monitor and to take action on customer issues and ideas. At the same time, they maintain tight central control over content and the engagement of individual baristas in their many outlets.

Toyota says you have to be in it for the long haul. No surprise there; social media is an investment of time and energy that will only pay off over time. That’s a disappointment to many who are looking for immediate returns.

SAP makes a practice of engaging in new channels where people already are. That makes it easier to listen and understand; they also encourage employees who are already active on newer channels like Twitter.

Dell points out that you have to be conversational from the start. Again—not a surprise, just really hard to do, especially for newbie brand practitioner.





























The Wetpaint/Altimeter group links customer engagement to financial performance and argues that it is a more powerful driver that traditional measures of customer satisfaction. Gallup consulting agrees, and has their own measures of engagement that allow them to group firms by level of engagement. You can read their full report here.

While researching this post, I also ran across a recent article in Forbes that argues for the importance of engaging customers while admitting that engagement is hard to measure. None of this content could be judged as totally unbiased because all the marketing services/consulting firms represented have a stake in creating or measuring engagement.

For me, it’s hard to refute the arguments. You should make your own judgment!

Starbucks Listens--and Acts!

Earlier in the week Michael Estrin had a good advice in iMediaConnection for those who want to have a good blog, either personal or corporate. The graphic from Starbucks caught my eye. It perfectly captures the concept of a community being involved in idea generation for a brand.

I always wonder whether companies follow up on good ideas so I checked it out. Here’s what I found.
















The My Starbucks Idea site seems to be the home page of the enterprise. It’s where you can sign up to be part of the idea generation process. It’s on a SalesForce.com platform, so clearly it’s intended for CRM. Do the numbers in the Categories section represent posts and comments—5,483 for Tea & Other Drinks, for example. Probably. I checked some of them and there are active postings, comments and discussions.

The Idea page links to the Ideas in Action blog where Starbucks employees give feedback. I captured a post that’s reporting on the number of ideas launched in a given week. Posts are frequent.

What’s really interesting is that there tend to be 2 or 3 comments on those employee blog posts—agree, disagree, whatever—there are a few comments on each post. Comments on the Idea site tend to be more active, and assuming that a point for a post represents a vote, the voting is very active. My point is that there seems to be more action on the site that’s mostly UGC than on the blog where employees, chosen for their expertise according to the site, blog about what they have actually done. Worth thinking about! Does it mean that brand enthusiasts enjoy talking with one another even more than they enjoy talking directly to the brand?

All in all, it’s a site—and a concept—worth exploring. Starbucks has created a community around something everyone loves to do—telling you how they think you should run their business. They’ve found a way to involve and engage, and they are following up in a disciplined fashion.

I’m not saying any of this is particularly easy, especially the follow-up. I am saying that it’s worth seeing what you can learn from Starbucks about engaging customers in your own brand.

Cisco Engages B2B Customers in Idea Generation

In my early days writing about the web, I remember my editor saying that I just had to read a book entitled Net Ready that focused on Cisco Systems’ thoughtful use of the web, especially connecting its customers to provide support to one another. That was easily a decade ago but the title well describes Cisco’s continuing innovation of Internet marketing programs.


Cisco recently launched a promotion for its WebEx conferencing system that makes good use of both social media and cause-related marketing. Called Pass the Ball, it asks people to submit ideas that can help change the world and to rate the ideas of others. Each time an idea is submitted or rated, Cisco makes a donation to Teachers without Borders.

I count 10 categories of ideas ranging from Education/Innovation with 117 ideas currently to Sports/Entertainment with 26. (What does it say about their target audience that Arts/Culture has more ideas than Sports at 36? Some of the other categories have a predictably high level of activity, but that comparison is fascinating!)

They are working the promo aggressively with activity on Facebook and Twitter, especially. The Twitter “ad” on this page appears to be a live feed instead of a “safe” static capture as is sometimes done.

In looking for information, I ran across their recent Connected Life campaign. It had a different scope (it didn’t seem to focus on a specific brand, but instead on their corporate theme) and it attracted over 600 entries from a selected set of countries. I don’t know what their success metrics are, but 600 entries looks pretty good to me. The implication is that Cisco knows how to involve and engage their totally B2B audience, and it seems reasonable to assume this benefits their brands like WebEx.

It also suggests another issue. I read somewhere recently that one social media practitioner disputed the idea that there are social media programs/campaigns (I use the 2 terms interchangeably). The argument was that social media involvement is an ongoing process, not a campaign with a beginning and end. The Cisco programs seem to illustrate the issue.

Corporate social media involvement has to be an ongoing process; you just can’t turn it on and off, you have to stay involved. Equally important, corporate marketing departments have to learn from each social media foray and practice continuous improvement. At the same time, there can be individual programs like these two from Cisco that have distinct beginnings and endings. The skill then becomes integrating these promotions into an overall, long-term social media strategy.

Another important integration issue—interesting, isn’t it?

CNN Engages Inaugural Viewers

Have you also been glued to the television—or other communications channels—for the last few days? By all accounts, the number of people around the world who watched some portion of the inaugural was historic. Also historic was the number of options we had for watching the occasion.

I wrote about CNN’s “magic map” during the campaign, so I made my plans to watch when CNN began touting new technology and a partnership with Facebook. Watching on Facebook with my friends was fascinating. When I logged on some were already there discussing the fact that they didn’t like the dress Oprah had on Monday—ok. Others came on as the swearing in neared. Most of my friends are former students and my daughter and her friends—in other words, much younger than I—not surprising. They made comments as events went on by writing on Facebook walls. In one of the screen shots I have the CNN comment box open, so there were multiple options to participate.
Social media maven C. C. Chapman was “in the room.” His comments were interesting and he pointed out that the new White House site had gone live--although apparently not without a few glitches—with a blog post at 12:01 p.m. This post, expressing the communications objectives of the administration, is interesting.

Watching video with the television on in the background was interesting too. CNN obviously had numerous cameras around. When you paid attention, you realized that video was more likely to have chose-up shots and the “big screen” was able to move between long views and close-ups more readily. Interesting. But, in general, the quality of the video was excellent and overall it was a good consumer experience.

The technology that was debuted (on CNN anyway; it’s Micro Soft technology that is not brand new) is also interesting and even more directly engaging. John King, the maestro of the magic map, explains it in this video.

By early evening they had the map page up. It’s probably even more detailed by this morning, although I don’t know that the casual observer can tell the difference. Try it; it’s fun to move around and look at “The Moment” from different angles. My only quibble is that, even knowing about it, I couldn’t find it on the CNN site until Wolf Blitzer gave me the URL on television. Oh, well, I guess that’s media integration!

It’s clear that the channels options contributed to the audience that was able to watch this event from all over the world. It’s also clear to me that CNN is on to something. People love to contribute, and they are giving them opportunities to do. Maybe it’s accurate to say that they have taken a page from direct marketers and make it easy to take action—in this case to contribute content.

Note something else. There were other interesting media activities yesterday. As a blogger, I was watching the Facebook/CNN partnership for the purpose of this post, and I stayed there so I wouldn’t miss something. But I’m not sure I would have moved around a lot anyway. This whole thing captured my attention and kept it for several hours. Isn’t that what engagement is about?

I’d also suggest watching the activities of the White House media team. They are working on engagement also, and, in fact, leading the way in some aspects. Isn’t that a novel experience?

Twittering to Support Their Brands

There’s been controversy lately in the pages of ClickZ about the value of Twitter in business communications, both pro and con.





Comcast, aka ComcastCares, runs its Twitter activity out of the customer service department, and that’s clearly the thrust of the activity, beginning with the name. Dunkin Donuts, on the other hand, started their Twitter program with the rather vague goal of engaging with their loyal customers. Another interesting difference is that the ComcastCares account has a human face, Frank Eliason, their Director of Digital Care. The Dunkin Donuts Twitter page identifies only “Dunkin' Dave, ” whom I would guess to be David Tryder, their Manager of Interactive Marketing. Two points. First, I prefer the identifiable human face—what about you? Second, even though a Twitter account is free, these programs are taking up the time of top marketing executives. They need to be worthy of that time.

The major buzz at the moment is around Scott Monty, formerly of the Crayon agency, who was hired to bring Ford into the social media age. In a short time at Ford he has already used Twitter to good effect in dealing with brand controversies including one with the independent aftermarket products site The Ranger Station. Scott’s full title is Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager for Ford and he has a strong strategic perspective on social media, including Twitter. Here’s an interview that’s worth listening to.

Did you know that the Prime Minister of Great Britain twitters? Well, at least someone in his office maintains an account for the PM. Barak Obama used Twitter in the campaign, and I doubt he wrote his messages either. That’s another model.

The take-away from all of this twitter about Twitter is that it does have potential uses, whether as a reputation management tool, a customer service tool, or – more problematically—just to hear what your customers are thinking. The emphasis should be on tool. And the question should be “how does this tool fit into our strategy?” Then there are issues of who has the expertise to do it well and how management is going to evaluate its effectiveness.

All of which says that--unlike individual consumers who may be twittering just for fun--it should be a strategic undertaking, not just “should we twitter?”

Measuring Engagement

This could be a really short post. There is no commonly-accepted measure of engagement—bye, see you tomorrow!

Clearly that’s not very useful, so I’ll present some perspectives and approaches. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit in part 2 of their Beyond Loyalty report,

Some executives have decided that precise measurements may not be possible, and are trying to satisfy themselves with more general measures. “Quite often, the customer is satisfied, and if the customer satisfaction index goes up, that’s good enough,” says Mr Jennings of Reuters.

Interestingly enough, they point up the fallacy of the “we can’t measure it” approach in the paragraph immediately before:

Nearly half of our survey respondents say that the difficulty of measuring engagement is perhaps the biggest barrier to achieving greater levels of customer engagement. (both quotes page 9)

And I am often reminded of the quality management truism, “What gets measured, gets managed.” So ok, metrics are important, and some commercial measures are available. A search of comScore press releases turned up 45 releases on engagement and revealed metrics such as “visits” and “duration.” These are important site statistics, but are they a complete measure of engagement? Not as we’ve defined it.

About a year ago Jerimiah Owyang summarized a number of approaches to the engagement metric in an excellent blog post. It has lots of links and many interesting comments and it’s useful background leading up to a report released by Eric T. Peterson and others on September 7 of this year. This 54-page report is called “Measuring the Immeasurable: Visitor Engagement.”
Peterson and his colleagues go into great detail on the measurement issues and if you’re a metrics wonk—or if measuring engagement is mission critical to you—then you should read it all. I’ll summarize in lay terms, starting with Peterson’s conceptual definition:

Visitor Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals.

That’s a statement that incorporates behavior both on and off the website, and that’s important. As stated, though, it’s not measurable. Their computational definition is:

“Visitor Engagement is a function of the number of clicks (Ci), the visit duration (Di), the rate at which the visitor returns to the site over time (Ri), their overall loyalty to the site (Li), their measured awareness of the brand (Bi), their willingness to directly contribute feedback (Fi) and the likelihood that they will engage in specific activities on the site designed to increase awareness and create a lasting impression (Ii).”

Here is how they define the variables:
Click Depth Index: Captures the contribution of page and event views
Duration Index: Captures the contribution of time spent on site
Recency Index: Captures the visitor’s “visit velocity”—the rate at which visitors return to the web site over time
Brand Index: Captures the apparent awareness of the visitor of the brand, site, or product(s)
Feedback Index: Captures qualitative information including propensity to solicit additional information or supply
direct feedback
Interaction Index: Captures visitor interaction with content or functionality designed to increase level of Attention
the visitor is paying to the brand, site, or product(s)
Loyalty Index: Captures the level of long-term interaction the visitor has with the brand, site, or product(s)

The good news is that these all appear to be metrics that can be derived from or added to existing metrics programs. That’s also essential, because a good metric for engagement must be part of a comprehensive metrics effort.

My guess is that this metric or one like it will soon be available from metrics firms, although I can’t find any evidence of it yet.

Marketers need to decide whether engagement is an important part of their ongoing strategy. The first post in this series suggests that it should be. Engagement is part of all the models of new media strategy, including mine.

The major point of this series of three posts is that engagement is more than choosing “engaging media.” It represents the outcome of ongoing dialog with customers and the larger community around a brand. Making that work requires both commitment and a rational strategy. Are you working on it?

Part 1 here
Part 2 here