Why and How Leaders Must Engage in Social Media

When I did a presentation on social media for C-level women executives last year I argued that leaders must engage with stakeholders in order to lead engaged organizations. I believed that then; I believe it now. People just can’t do “social media appreciation,” they have to participate at some level in order to understand how it really works. If they don’t understand how it really works, how can they assess how well their organization is doing?

In the interim, I’m happy to note that there has been research on the issue. The BRANDfog CEO survey published in the spring has gotten considerable attention. It quotes Aman Singh of CSRwire and Forbes.com as saying:

Transparency, vision and open communication are key to great leadership and corporate social responsibility strategy today. . .customers expect to hear from the executive leadership team on social media channels, as a direct way to connect and engage with the brands they love and the causes they support.

The data I find most compelling is that 82% of respondents are much more likely/more likely to trust a company whose executive team communicates openly. That is the gist of my argument.

When I sat down to write this post I looked for other recent studies. I was only mildly surprised to find that IBM’s Executive Exchange has a larger, personal interview survey fielded about the same time; IBM is good at social media, externally and especially internally. Again, one quote seemed to nail the situation: 

Though CEOs frequently mentioned dipping their toes into social media waters, few claim to be personally immersed. This arms-length involvement puts CEOs in a precarious position. They are making critical judgments about a disruptive technology without much firsthand knowledge. And they’re uncomfortably reliant on the counsel of less experienced Generation Y advisors. “For the first time in my career, I feel old. People in their 20s work and think about this social stuff in a different way,” a U.K. insurance industry CEO shared. “We’re using it as a way of connecting with friends and socializing; the kids coming up are using it as a way of life.”

These CEOs see social media use increasing by over 250% during the next five years to become the second most important way of engaging with customers. They still see face-to-face as number one. Over the same time frame, they see the importance of traditional media decreasing by over 60%.

The IBM argument is that connectedness through social media is not just a customer issue. Open communications also build and strengthen ties with employees and partners. There is no implication that it is three separate streams of communication. At the CEO level it’s about vision and values with detail on activities mostly left to the functional specialists. There is no implied platform recommendation either. The advice is “Be where your customers expect you to be.” They emphasize the importance of mobile to expectations about timely information. However, in this context mobile is not a platform. It’s a way of delivering social networks to customers according to their expectations.

The picture is one of a media world in the process of revolutionary change and the IBM study making the clearest statement I’ve yet seen of CEOs knowing they need to be part of that change but not knowing exactly how.

So I go back to my original argument; leaders need some personal exposure. Writing in WSJ, Dr. Alexandra Samuel has interesting recommendations leaders and would-be leaders should read for themselves. She sees interesting time-saving value in effective use of Twitter and mentions pressure for CEO blogs. She also suggests having some fun (“Build a Golf Course”) while learning.

If social media is essential to corporate communications and if executives can engage in ways that use time effectively, what reason is left not to engage in a personal and meaningful fashion?

Social Media Chronicles Engagement in Super Bowl 2012

How many people watched the Super Bowl with a smart device or a laptop handy? According to Nielsen over 111 million people, 53.3 million households, watched the game itself. NBC says that 2.1 million unique viewers watched it online, the most ever for an online sports event.

Even more than the number who streamed, two questions especially interest marketers:

1. How many people actually watched with a smart device handy?
2. Who were they, how often were they socializing, and what were they talking about?

There will probably be a number on actual two-screen watchers soon, but a pre-game survey gives an interesting preview. According to Velti, 60% of mobile users planned to use their mobile device during the game. Here’s how their plans broke down:
1. 13% intended to use their devices during game play; 26% were going to use them during commercial breaks
2. During the halftime show, twice as many men as women (26% to 13%) planned to use their mobile devices
3. 18 to 34 year olds had the highest anticipated usage; they expected to check their devices an average of 19 times during the game.
4. The mobile users are not loners; 97% will watch with someone else; they expect 47% of their co-watchers to also be checking their mobile devices.
This is confirmation of the multitasking study I wrote about a few months ago.

CNN has an interesting perspective on what they did. According to their data from Trendr there were over 17 million interactions during the game. The traffic data supports their pregame plans. CNN chose some of the best tweets on various topics. Some are great; check them out.

I thought the approach taken by CNBC was most interesting to social media aficionados. According to Collective Intellect their Ad Tracker went  beyond overall buzz and general sentiment scores to ranks each brand based on their percent share of several conversational indicators we call dimensions. They ranked the funniest ads and also the “best.” There’s a lot of similarity to the traditional best ad ranking of USA Today and a variety of content-oriented rankings from Ad Age. Facebook had an ad meter on the official SB site—another sign of the times!

View video here

What is the take-away from all these numbers? It seems inescapable: social media and smart devices—and social media on smart devices—has become a mainstay of the lives of many consumers, especially the Millennials and their younger siblings, the Net Generation. Older generations are heavy users also, but perhaps have not integrated social/mobile into the very fabric of their lives to the same extent. The message to marketers seems clear. This is the SoMo portion of SoLoMo: marketers who are not in this game are missing the trend. The scary thing is that this is probably not the last trend; marketers who ignore the message of integrating their communications can only fall further behind.

Rich Text Article first published as Social Media Chronicles Super Bowl XLVI Engagement on Technorati.

Why Leaders Must Engage with Social Media

Tomorrow I'm giving a presentation on social media at the Women & Power Conference Reunion at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While I'm convinced that not all C-level executives need to be Twitter junkies, I am absolutely convinced that they need to be acquainted with social media.

There are two basic reasons:

1. There may be external events that are picked up on social media and require attention.
2. There may be internal activities that are good and need to be encouraged or potentially damaging and need to be restrained or monitored.

How does the relevant C-level executive know what to do (or not do) if she does not understand social media?

W&P Reunion.pptx

View more presentations from diy-marketing

This presentation was a lot of fun to develop. I hope you have equal fun reading it.

Even more, what are your thoughts on this important, but undercovered, subject?

Collaborating with Customers - B2C and B2B

Step 1 - Listen
Step 2 - Respond
Step 3 - Engage

I’m ready to write a post about the 4th step in the revised social media strategy development model. The old model called it CoCreate. This one uses the term Collaborate. Collaborate maybe sounds a little less formidable, a little easier to do. The more I’ve thought about that, the more I’ve realized it’s just not so. It’s really hard. Sometimes it seems impossible. I’m going to explain why by using recent data on Forrester’s Social Technographics data and add some insights I’ve derived, virtually all from mistakes I’ve made.

I’ve written about the Technographics ladder before, because it’s a real asset to understanding what’s going on in this space. With the 2009 data, they’ve added a new rung on the ladder. It’s called “Conversationalists” and it primarily reflects the influence of Twitter on the social media scene. Obviously these categories are not mutually exclusive; most of us fall into one category at some point, or in connection with some brand, and into another category in a different situation. That’s life. But what is key to understanding the difficulty of encouraging collaboration--of getting customers to create content-- is the size of the Spectators segment; 70% of consumers fall into that segment at least part of the time. Add to that the next step on the ladder. Joiners aren’t cocreators; they have a profile, but beyond that they are consumers, just like Spectators. In fact, it’s not until you get up to the Critics and the new Conversationalists that you get content creation, from ratings to status updates to Tweets. Those are fine and increasingly important to marketers. However, it’s only a small part of the online population that creates content that generally goes beyond 140 characters!

Looking at the total population is, of course, useful. But it’s not your target market. I found a good example in the B2B space. I used Forrester’s profile tool (which doesn’t yet have the Conversationalists), just set for the entire B2B market. I got a profile that’s not hugely different from the consumer population profile, which isn’t particularly surprising because these activities carry over from our private lives to our business lives—and vice versa.

Josh Berman fortunately published a more detailed example in early 09, also based on their survey of business buyers. I’m including the chart with his commentary, which just deals with the “overall” and “for business purposes” categories on the right. Virtually everyone in the B2B space falls into the Spectator category—that’s a critical insight. 69% of them are doing so for business purposes, and in the blue bars you’ll notice that is not really different for IT managers and managers in a line of business who make technology decisions. A few more of these business decision makers fall into the active categories of Critics and Creators. That gives them an opportunity to be influentials in their business discipline.

And that begins to get to my points. I would suggest that:
• It’s really hard for a brand to get people to contribute if they already do not. You can—and should work on it—invite people to write reviews, for example. In the consumer space, it’s relatively easy to reward people for doing it; loyalty points are an interesting consideration. Incentives are always useful, and you may be able to find useful incentives in B2B as well as B2C.
• Once you identify customers who are taking the “baby steps” of, say, writing reviews, can you encourage them to do more? Whether it’s a blog comment or a wiki contribution, it’s a good step. Business customers love to give their opinions and ideas as sites like Dell’s IdeaStorm demonstrate, so it may be easier to give them an opportunity and let them go to it.
• All the chicklets that are encouraging us to Tweet or Digg content items are trying to get people to be more active in the conversation arena, and it’s worth making it easy to do. I’m not sure how much it contributes to a feeling of collaboration, but it’s great additional visibility. It might even create a customer perception of supporting the brand over time.
• Can you encourage customers to become Creators? All the B2C video contests like “Help Flo” are an example that you can. And those will probably continue to work well in the B2C space as long as you have a creative campaign.
B2B seems to offer a lot of opportunities to help customers become thought leaders. It’s the standard “speak at the conference” appeal. Now that can be expanded to blogs and other content repositories. That clearly leads to a feeling of being valued and I don’t see how it can do anything but strengthen the relationship between brand and customer.

I see two key take-aways in this. First, you can’t easily get people to participate in activities they aren’t already familiar with. If you have a target audience that’s pretty much Spectator-only, don’t try to make them Creators overnight. It’s just not going to happen.

Second, the marketing practice of trying to locate the opinion leaders (influentials) has come into its own. Customers are self-identifying by their blogs and other online creations. Find them and reach out to them. The case of the Coke fan page has become the classic case of doing just that. Your outreach may not always have such spectacular results, but it will be worthwhile. It just takes the patience and persistence that’s mandatory in the social media space!

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!

The New CNN - Marriage of Site and Social?

Very early this morning I heard John Roberts and Kiran Chetry introducing the new CNN website on American Morning. Even at the early hour it sounded interesting, so I checked it out.

CNN's web designers seem to have brought as many different types of content to the home page as possible. It has latest news and features -- both headlines and videos, most popular (newspulse), a whole banner of editor’s picks videos in a banner across the middle of the page and topic boxes with links to stories. I think that sounds confusing, but it’s well organized and easy to follow. Take a look for yourself.


It was the personalization and social features that I was most interested in, though. There are more, but here are two that I investigated. I set up a profile, personalized my weather for Boston (easy), tried to upload a picture (didn’t work), and followed some topics, which John and Kiran said was easy. I didn’t find it so, at least initially, but as you can see, I did make it work. I wanted to follow Tech and thought I’d get latest headlines. All the RSS feeds to that macro level of topics are still there, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. What I found was that I had to read an article; at the end there was a Follow This Topic button. Hitting that button usually gave me several keyword-type choices which then showed up on my profile page. The topics are rather micro for my taste, but it will be interesting to follow them for awhile and see what shows up. You can follow up to 12 topics, which on the one hand is enough to keep up with, but on the other hand may not give the reader much of a perspective, given the small scope of most of the topics.

I’m not an iReporter, but I was interested in what’s happening on the citizen journalism front. What was new to me was the concept of “vetted” iReports. These reports have been checked (for correctness, acceptability, they don’t say exactly what) by CNN editors. One assumes that’s an attempt to give credibility to citizen journalism. On the iReport main page they have an Assignment Desk where readers can get story ideas while in search of their 15 minutes of fame. That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s the real purpose, for CNN or for local news sites. News happens and often reporters aren’t on the scene, but people with their phone cameras are. With that in mind, CNN just launched an iPhone app so people can upload iReports directly from 3GS iPhones. Events and breaking news seem to be the whole point!

As I looked as this I was reminded of a section of last year’s Razorfish FEED report (now hard to find but is on SlideShare). The chapter on usability/Dr. Nielsen is what I was recalling and here is the provocative quote:

The New Building Blocks

Jakob says:
People don’t read your websites; use a different editorial style and make your pages “scannable.”

We say:
Throw away your concept of primarily designing “pages” as building blocks and start designing experiences. (slide 20)

I think that’s what CNN is trying to do. Call it engagement, call it offering experiences, it may be a guidepost on the road to the future of the web. It’s an experiment worth following.

9/11, Service and Social Media

On September 11 a lot of people want to do something. Using social media to support that very human emotion makes sense.
This morning I got an email from Service Nation, a non-profit that encourages citizen service opportunities. Among the service initiatives they are promoting on 9/11 is a Cities of Service Program. The idea is for individual citizens to submit service ideas/opportunity to the major of their city. The email linked to a simple form for that purpose.

New York City Mayor Bloomberg appears to have led the way with a program to encourage New Yorkers, especially young people, to volunteer for service. It has an active website, many non-profit organizations as partners, and initial commitments from citizens from all walks of life to serve.

There’s a catchy and engaging part of the program called “Share Your Blank.” The point is that everyone has something worthwhile to share. The program not only allows them to serve, it allows them to talk about their service in order to inspire others—social media in action.

One important point is that initiatives like this don’t happen in isolation. I heard about it from Service Nation. NYC had a lot of partners when they launched the program. It seems vibrant and active, so they probably have more now.

It’s not only a lesson in encouraging service; it’s a lesson in making social media social. Both are appropriate on 9/11.

Starbucks is Most Engaged Brand

This morning I ran across an interesting followup to last week's post about Starbucks. A study by Wetpaint and Charlene Li of Altimeter Group found Starbucks to be the most engaged of the 100 top global brands studied.

They used "over 40 attributes" to measure engagement (p. 21)--no they didn't say which attributes. They then correlated engagement with financial results and found that "financial performance correlates with engagement" (p. 6). That alone should be enough to get your attention!


They discuss brand engagement best practices with emphasis on Starbucks but including others. There are other interesting findings, including a typology of firms based on their engagement practices. Is your brand a Maven, Butterfly, Selective or Wallflower? According to their findings, it matters!

A report worth reading--carefully!

Engagement--The New PR Paradigm?

This one I picked up on Twitter from @mattrhodes of Fresh Networks in London. It’s an instructive look at PR in the age of social media. The concept of public engagement is an interesting one. The emphasis on search as central to PR—and to social media in general, I would add—is important. Their summary of the tools of public engagement (slide 25) is worth study. I’d encourage you to page through the presentation. The media data in “chapter 1” is the same refrain, but it sets the stage for PR having to work differently, especially in the light of a faltering newspaper industry.

Open publication - Free publishing - More edelman

In following Matt’s Tweet to this presentation I also discovered a new site, Issuu. It offers online publishing services, free to the public with a paid platform for business and is headquartered in Copenhagen. I was particularly interested in its stated ability to create online magazines; you can see that from the way the slideshow plays on their viewer. It looks like a site worth trying out.

Consider the trail of influence here—a presentation by a global PR firm, brought to the attention of a US blogger by a British social marketer, published on a Danish site. Is this not an example of the “New Influencers?”

LinkedIn Polls--Uses and Abuses

People have been sending me polls lately. When I see them on news sites, I often don’t answer them. When someone goes to the trouble of emailing it to me, I often do. That said, I can’t remember who sent me a LinkedIn poll about the virtues of advertising during a recession but I answered it, checked to my answer against others (a minority position, I’m sorry to say), then started thinking.
I remembered answering one or two when CNBC partnered with LinkedIn last fall to do what I thought was going to be a daily business poll. CNBC is still doing them, but not regularly. I have the TV set to CNBC several hours most weekdays, and I haven’t heard about them in quite awhile. I don’t see anything on their home page. Do they publicize the polls in daily news alerts? At all? I don’t know.

The Poll app seems to be first cousin to the LinkedIn Answers app (I think you have to be signed in to see both). Either one can be put on your LinkedIn profile page. The Answers page is personalized to interests of the user, presumably issues listed on the user profile. Note that a question about online promotion/advertising by John Batelle is the Featured question on my page when I checked it (clearly they know it’s me; the profile picture is a nice touch to point out that you are identified, non anonymous).
Note that if you want to set up a polling option you can send it to your own network free. If you want to use LinkedIn’s targeting options, you have to upgrade to Premium membership. I didn’t try it because a question to the lovely people in my network “just to see if the app worked” seemed quite spammy to me.

Is this more than just fun and games, social media style? Maybe.

If you have a serious question that matches the expertise of people in your network, it’s worth asking. I would be more inclined to use the Answers app than the Poll for a serious question, so respondents could explain their reasoning.

Can the polls simply be used as an engagement device—clearly the intention of people who have emailed them to me recently? Maybe, but I don’t think you ought to push that unless you have a consistent stream of REALLY INTERESTING questions, and that’s hard. The email I received from a news site asked me to answer the daily poll and to suggest questions. Engaging, but also a suggestion that they don’t have a bright idea for every day! I also ran across a blogger who was annoyed by getting the same poll two days in a row, although my guess is that it was an opt-in. Good point anyway. The rule should be “engage, not annoy.” Where do you draw the line for your own target audience?

I guess I come down on the side of this being a better technique for a specific answer to a professional question than as an ongoing engagement device, whatever your target audience. I have no issue with polls on your page, website, whatever—anywhere they are not intrusive. When you email them to people, they become intrusive, and caution is urged!

Still Thinking About Social Media Metrics

This spring I’m having the fascinating experience of watching a classroom full of young marketers try to wrap their arms around the world of social media. Some work with mass media, some also work with Internet advertising and promotion. A very few are involved in social media programs in their firm. For all of them, narrowing their focus to a single social media program, especially to how to measure it, has been a challenge.

If you start from the perspective that social media is going to be part of an integrated marketing communications mix (can it work otherwise???), the need to focus one program at a time becomes clear. By that, I don’t mean that only one social media program is being executed at once. There could be a program aimed at acquisition and another aimed at retention being executed simultaneously, for example. My point is that you have to plan and evaluate those programs separately. It also helps to focus attention when you point out that it’s necessary to have measures of success for your boss!

I recognize the value of social media in creating brand awareness. However, I argue against awareness as a measure of success for any single program in any medium. We learned the reasons why in Advertising 101; there’s a lot going on, and it’s hard to isolate the effects of a single program on a broad attitudinal measure. It can be done, but it takes marketing research and that takes time and costs money. Consequently, I argue for specific social media behaviors as objectives for and measures of the effectiveness of social media programs.

Up to this point, I think I got it right. I laid out the argument in a two part post on Identifying and Measuring Social Media Behaviors (Part 1, Part 2). Soon after, I read an article by Shane Atchison in ClickZ that made me realize that I didn’t go far enough. Shane is trying to get marketers to dig deeper to really understand how they are (or are not) creating value for users. He says:

value happens not when people buy your product but when they use it and love it. Not when they upload a video, but when someone else watches it. . . don't stop at measuring your marketing efforts' success, or even the sentiment expressed in the broader online conversation about your brand. It's great to monitor online activity, better to develop reporting around online activity, and better yet to engage customers in their native online habitats.

Different behaviors do have different value as far as marketers are concerned, and we should concentrate on encourage the behaviors that are more valuable. “Friending” is more valuable than simply viewing, for example. With that in mind, I revised my list from the original post. I put “attention” and “engagement” in quotes because I’m still not sure they are the right terms. However, they are clearly not the same, so it’s a start.

Behaviors in the Social Ecosphere

“Attention” Metrics
Number of visits, impressions (eyeball measures)
Attention/engagement
Pages: how much time spent, “heat maps” for content, etc.
Video: watched, partly/completely
Number of incoming links
"Engagement" Metrics
Friends, fans, favs (followers of all kinds)
Install apps (widgets, etc.) offered
Share content
Promote content (Digg, Reddit, etc.)
Comment/co-create
Ultimate Social Media Metric
Click through to website

Behaviors on the Website

Traffic Metric
Number of referrals from social media sites
“Engagement” Metrics
Register for site services
Download—white papers, videos, podcasts, etc.
Rate products
Other content cocreation (photos, videos, written content, etc.)
Ultimate Website Metric
Transaction (sale, download, join, etc.)

Notice that we now have a funnel that resembles the traditional conversion funnel. In effect, it gives us a hierarchy of objectives/ metrics from which we can choose in moving toward our “ultimate” objective.

I feel a graphic coming on! Anyone want to make additions, clarifications, changes before I do it?

Which Communications Channel is Most Popular?

You may have noticed the headline on Marketing Charts about a week ago, “Social Nets and Blogs More Popular than Email.” As often happens, the headline oversimplifies a complex reality that deserves a closer look. According to Marketing Charts:

Social Networking has been the global consumer phenomenon of 2008. Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population(1) visit a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10% of all internettime. ‘Member Communities’(2) has overtaken personal Email to become the world’s fourth most popular online sector after search, portals and PC software applications.

Their metric is “global active reach” and communities did, in fact, slightly outdistance email in 2008. The chart clearly shows communities to be the fastest-growing sector, which is consistent with other data. The report shows differences in use and growth rate from one country to another. If you're a global marketer, it's must reading.

To put another piece in the puzzle I looked at the OPA’s Internet Activity chart for January 2009. It’s also Nielsen data, and I’ve always believed it to be US only, but I can’t find that specific statement. What it definitely is, though, is a “time spent on the Internet” metric. It shows Internet users spending almost half their time on content, about a fourth on communications and roughly 10% on community activities. Using this metric, community is also the fastest growing—no ambiguity there!

That encourages me to return to the Razorfish Digital Outlook report I discussed last week. The chapter on “Social Influence Marketing” (their concept; pp. 27-33) predicts that the impact of social media marketing and the importance of the influentials in that context will continue to grow. They also see the interconnectedness of the various social media platforms, and therefore of personal networks, growing. That could lead to greater importance of mere acquaintances as opposed to your closest friends, as they introduce new members and new ideas into personal networks.

While Razorfish is clearly promoting their own proprietary concept, it is also obvious that marketers can’t just dive into the social media pond and expect things to happen. Whether you are reaching out to bloggers or attracting fans to your Facebook page or encouraging followers on Twitter, there are people who are more connected, more vocal, more influential.

If you can engage them in your activities, they will attract others. If they do choose to become engaged, does that mean they like you? My answer is “probably.” Otherwise, why would they engage?

Think about 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?

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

Drivers of Consumer Engagement

Yesterday I wrote about engagement—what it is and why it is important. The key take-away is that the combination of consumer and employee engagement improves bottom-line performance. I’ll concentrate on the consumer side and ask, “How do we go about producing consumer engagement?”

A superficial answer is that the new social media are interactive and engaging. That’s true, but it doesn’t provide guidance for marketing strategy. It’s not enough to just add some videos or start a company blog without having clear goals in mind and strategies for getting there. So the real question seems to be, “How do we get consumers to engage with our brand?” The chart from a recent Jupiter Research report distinguishes between interaction-based and communications-based engagement techniques and asks which ones marketers are using. That’s an interesting perspective, but it doesn’t address the strategy issue. Notice that their sample is “social marketers;” usage of these techniques is not this high among all marketers.

Last month I wrote about a CMO study of consumer experience with leading brands across several communications channels. That study focuses on the role of consistent, integrated content delivery across all channels—communications engagement in Jupiter terms. The most important part of the report (download here) may be the latter pages in which they give the items on which they rate the brand performance in each channel. Those items suggest performance benchmarks. However, that still doesn’t necessarily guide marketers in search of their own strategy, particularly which elements of social media will produce the most useful kind of engagement.

A study in 2006 by Carat for IAB in the UK is helpful. It focuses on mothers with small children choosing among several small car brands. The research on their information sources and decision processes summarized in this chart is pretty standard—multiple items (in this case “contact points”) factored into several engagement factors. Assuming typical marketing research, those factors have a significant impact on engagement with the brand. I’m not clear, though, how they measured brand engagement. There is an interesting Guide on this page, along with a series of brand engagement studies including this one, but I haven’t found the specific metric for engagement. I’m accepting it because they seem to be using “brand engagement” consistently, and I'm sure they must have defined it somewhere, perhaps in the IAB member content.

This kind of study (and they find the drivers to be different from one industry to another) illuminates the strategy development process. If the marketer knows the criteria (the factors, in this case) on which the consumer makes decisions, she can work to move the needle on one or more important factors. In this case, style is most important. Which experiential/ engagement techniques will move the needle on style? Video, perhaps? A customize your car, in this case around the needs of your children and resulting lifestyle? Fun is the second most important factor. How do you allow female customers to participate, even help to create, the “fun” part of the car experience? And since they want a feminine car, how do you deliver this to women and not to men?

I keep thinking that there is so much that marketers COULD do in the arena of social media. The strategy question is, “What SHOULD we do?” There is no one-size-fits all answer—this view of engagement makes that clear!

The Meaning and Importance of Engagement

A few days ago I thought I’d do a quick search to find out how we marketers are defining and measuring engagement. It had been awhile since I checked this out and I assumed there would be greater unanimity about what we mean. The IAB has a working group considering related issues, but I didn’t find any public information, so I went looking. I came up with enough for several posts!

Along the way I ran across a relatively new firm that specializes in what Allegiance calls Enterprise Feedback Management. Its Engage Platform facilitates measurement of both customer and employee engagement as a driver of business results. We all know that happy, motivated (read that “engaged”) employees deliver better customer service and create happier customers, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that customer loyalty and employee loyalty are two sides of the same coin.

So with that perspective in mind, what is engagement? We don’t have a commonly-accepted definition yet. Some of the popular definitions are oriented to the impact on the brand, others to how we actually measure engagement. I’ll look at branding issues in this post and metrics in a follow-up.

Let’s start with the idea that it’s more than loyalty. We all know that many satisfied customers defect. I asked a group of students last week how many were “for sale” to better offers from marketers. Almost all of us are. So, as the caption of the graphic indicates, we need to go beyond satisfaction in our effort to prevent defections. Here’s Allegiance’s definition of engagement:

Allegiance considers engagement the emotional bond or attachment that a customer develops during the repeated and ongoing interactions accumulated as a satisfied, loyal and influencing customer.

Peppers and Rogers add that all definitions of engagement have three basic components; intellectual, behavioral and emotional. That’s the basic components of attitude in sociological theory, which tells us something about the concept of engagement. (You can download both Allegiance’s Discover Engagement and Peppers and Rogers Engagement, The New Competitive Advantage papers here.)

The thrust of the Peppers and Rogers paper is that engagement can and should be measured. Their engagement chain concept shows the major drives of engagement for both customers and employees. The drivers are measurable and the paper notes they can be divided into engaged, swing and disengaged customers. They don’t say so, but it seems most efficient to target swing customers in an attempt to increase their level of engagement.

Is it worth the effort? This chart says that it emphatically is. Performance is significantly better on a variety of financial metrics measured over various business units in 10 different companies when customers are engaged. Little surprise there! Similar outcomes for engaged employees are reported on page 4 of the report. Firms with both customers and employees who are engaged are roughly “twice as effective financially” as those who excel on only one type of engagement (page 5), so the combination is potent.

One thing that strikes me is that this is the update to the Bain loyalty studies that made such an impact on marketers in the 90s. Those studies helped realize the importance of customer loyalty and retention marketing programs. Even then we recognized that loyal customers recommended, referred and, in general, were advocates for the brand.

We have now invented the term “engagement” to help explain what happens beyond loyalty. I’ll come back to how to create engagement and more on engagement metrics in days to follow—stay engaged!

Online Content Sharing - The New WOM

The company responsible for the ubiquitous ShareThis icon (see the bottom of this post) has just released a study called “The Ins and Outs of Online Sharing.” The study, conducted by Forrester, provides some fascinating insights into content sharing on the web. Let me give you some of the study highlights.


Who Shares?

A majority of Internet users do share. Interestingly, more adults share email. Not surprisingly, youth (13 to 17) do more sharing of other media types. Are you using videos, wikis (that one surprises me; are there wikis that reach young people, or is it just Wikipedia?), and walls/discussion boards to reach young people?


What Do They Share?
Just read down the list. They share a lot of things! And the only content area where there’s a large difference between adults and young people is the entertainment category. That’s not surprising; how similar adults and youth are in the sharing of other types of content is. Are you providing the kinds of content that your audience most desires?

How Do They Share? Adults mostly use email. Young people share through IM, mobile, and their social networks. That’s hardly a revelation. But marketers need to think about their audience and how they want to share information. Are you making it easy for your audience to share content?


Why Do They Share? Read this one carefully—people share because they want to help others. (I’ve seen/heard that before, especially in discussions of travel sites where you can share experiences.) It’s an overriding motivation, and it doesn’t differ much between adults and youth. Users also share because they’ve found shared information useful, to share information about product quality, and just simply to show their enthusiasm. Wow—the top 4 reasons are positive. Dissatisfaction is number 5 and the incidence is much lower. Are you making it easy for customers to share their experiences with your product?

Is It Easy to Share? The good news is that it’s generally pretty easy. The number is well under 50% for most types of sharing. Youth experience more problems. That’s not surprising; they are sharing various types of media and that makes them more likely to run into problems. Are you removing obstacles that inhibit your audience from sharing?

The study also identified an intriguing segment—the Power Sharers. Power sharers use technology other than email to share content at least once a week. They also:

• Share with more people, regardless of the channel they are using
• Share different types of content more frequently
• Share for additional reasons. They are more likely to be motivated by community and by what the report characterizes as “self-expression.”
• Face more obstacles to sharing, especially lack of relevant contact information.

Pure and simple, these are opinion leaders. They’ve always existed and they’ve always been powerful. The Internet lets them exercise their particular expertise and passions in ways never before possible. It gives them the potential to reach more people than ever before.

Are you trying to identify opinion leaders and harness their enthusiasm in the service of your community?

Take another look at the Pickens Plan. I got an email from two individuals as soon as I joined; one was the regional coordinator. He’s being very quiet about how this now-sizeable community is being run, but I assume these people are volunteers. If I’m right, it’s an impressive harnessing of the enthusiasm and outreach of opinion leaders.

The report is lengthy and well interpreted. You can request a copy from Jeremy Bock at ShareThis.

These data remind me that Web 2.0 isn’t about technology. While Web 1.0 was about communication, Web 2.0 is coalescing around the concept of community. This study goes one step further in suggesting that we have to build those communities around (multi-media) content that is relevant to people’s lives (B2C) or work (B2B) and make it easy for people to interact around that content. People are voting with their Send, Forward, and ShareThis commands.

Are you letting them vote for your brand?

Engagement Metrics for Social Networks

There was an article today on CNET about start-up BuddyMedia and its new BuddyBrain metrics product. You can see the concept but there’s no sample data yet. The company’s press release provides data from 10 of their clients’ most popular apps:

• The app-vertisements averaged 140,000 installs during the first month of a campaign • Users spent an average of 2 minutes, 35 seconds interacting with applications
• 85% of users who installed the application(s) returned for multiple interactions
• 56% of users returned 9 or more times during the first month

The press release asserts that this is engagement rates 75 times higher than those achieved by banner ads and 5 times higher than with TV. This gives you a sense of the types of metrics they are collecting. Most of their apps so far seem to be on Facebook, so the level of interaction is understandable. Here’s an article with links to several of them. These apps encourage interactivity, that’s certain.

Is there any support for this kind of comparison between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 media engagement? Not that I could find. But I did find an interesting post by Jeremiah Owyang on an informal metrics survey that he did. It’s a long list and you should read it for yourself. The top 3 items are:

• Meets a business objective
• Supports Community Goals
• Encourage[s] Member Interaction

A more recent post gives the winners of the Forrester social network marketing assessment. They looked at programs from 16 firms. Only one passed using their “ ‘Social’ criteria (rather than traditional marketing tactics) that meet[s] the needs of the community.”

The one “pass” was given to BMW’s graffiti wall app that I’ve written about before. My sense was that it not only had many engagement features, it was clearly centered on the product; this is a marketing program, after all. The BMW campaign scored a 9 (“pass” was 8); Sony BMG’s Alica Keyes progam on My Space scored a 7. Half the 16 firms studied scored 0 or lower!

Most of us have a long way to go in learning how to effectively communicate with our audiences on the social portals and in other social media contexts. Part of the answer is to measure how well we are doing, and BuddyBrain is one approach to doing that. But there’s no substitute for the attitude adjustment that virtually all marketers need to make in order to function successfully in the Web 2.0 world. We have to quit shouting and start listening. Only then will we begin to develop creative ways of engaging with our audiences.

Is the Engagement Metric Evolving?

Microsoft’s announcement of its new Engagement Mapping metric at the IAB conference this week created additional buzz around what was already one of the hottest online marketing topics of the moment. And not just this particular moment—it has been ongoing for awhile. Last summer ARF Chief Research Officer Joe Plummer defined it this way, "Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." That’s an interesting concept, but it doesn’t give me any guidance as to how I could measure it.

Several marketers have proposed approaches to measuring brand engagement, especially online. Forrester has a concept that includes four factors--involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. That appears to combine attitudinal and behavioral measures, and that would be a strong approach. The public information makes it clear that it requires both online and offline data. That doesn’t make it cheap, but it makes it comprehensive, which is essential.

Brand Keys offers measures of engagement that are category-specific. Their measure relies heavily on customer expectations of brands in the category. They publish a list of highest-scoring brands in various categories each year.

Nielsen//NetRatings has changed its key measure of web traffic from page views to time spent on the site. They tout it as a better measure of engagement, and it certainly beats page views, which have well-known problems. However, that goes back to an old academic argument on the definition of brand loyalty (is engagement a precursor to loyalty--I think so). The argument is that loyalty is more than repeat purchase behavior—that can be just habit. True loyalty—and I suspect true engagement—requires understanding of attitudes as well as behavior.

Earlier this year Kevin Mannion wrote a three-part article (1, 2, 3) for MediaPost’s Metrics Insider Newsletter that gives an excellent summary of efforts to date. He references the work of Eric T. Peterson and Avinash Kaushik, both prolific writer/speakers on metrics issues. Mannion’s analysis of this body of work produces an engagement metric with six components. They are:
Loyalty: how often visitors return to a site over a long period of time.
Recency: how frequently visitors come to a site within a narrow time period.
Duration: how long visitors remain on the site.
Click Depth: the degree to which visitors view site content.
Interactivity: the kinds of actions visitors take with content (downloading content, viewing videos, attending webinars, posting content, etc.).
Subscription: the extent to which visitors register for services or content.
In the third installment he gives an example of how this metric would work. Note that it is all behavioral; to be specific it is all based on online metrics. That means it is based on data that online marketers currently can access.

That brings us full-circle to the Microsoft Engagement Mapping platform. According to Brian McAndrews of Microsoft, “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.” I can visualize what such a map would look like and how useful it would be, especially to the multichannel e-retailer.

It doesn’t solve the metrics issue, however. Engagement Mapping is all behavioral—more a measure of impact than engagement in my mind. If engagement is indeed an attitudinal state that is manifested in brand behavior of various types—both on and offline—we still don’t have a metric that truly captures the concept.
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