Advertising Industry on Engagement
Bess Ho left a comment on my blog about Engagement, she points to some additional resources how the Advertising industry is tackling the term Engagement. From an advertisings perspective, Jim Nail has come up with these four characteristics:

1. Media engagement: Ad-selling media organizations have pounced on engagement like a pride of lions on a wounded wildebeest. They aim to prove that their audience is more engaged with their media property than their competitors. But they typically fall back on old-school metrics like traffic or time spent with the medium. The ARF is trying to move beyond these metrics.

2. Ad engagement: Advertisers and agencies have begun to talk about how engaging their ads are but, again, typically relying on old communication metrics like attention or recall. These fall short of the ARF’s new definition because they only capture whether the audience saw the ad, while the ARF is aiming for a more subtle measure of whether the consumer reacted to the ad.

3. Engagement marketing: An approach that plans a sequence of activities to draw the consumer through the purchasing process, e.g., running an ad that drives the consumer to a website where they sign up for email that delivers additional information over time until the consumer buys. This sequence actually comes after the more emotional engagement the ARF is focused on.

4. Brand engagement: This sounds closer to the ARF’s idea, but also often defaults to old-school metrics like customer loyalty or the more recent Net Promoter score. Important metrics to be sure, but the ARF is looking to identify when the earliest beginnings of this consumer relationship happen so it can be nurtured and grown.

Comparing Definitions
That’s pretty interesting…here’s what I want to know: What are people doing, what did they think, and what was the end result? Engagement can be used across all of those questions to help tell the story.

The working definition of Engagement from Jim is “Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.”

My working definition of Engagement is:, “Engaged in the context of social measurement is a way of looking at depth of interest.” Notice, I didn’t use the word brand, as there are tons of ideas, memes, and conversations that have little or nothing to do with brands.

Social Media is more than trying to get clients to buy something, it’s about people talking to each other. Understanding the discussion of course will yield a better way to be part of this conversation.

Related Thoughts

• See all my thoughts on Social Media Measurement
• I emailed and got the Web Analytics community involved with this conversation too…interesting, we’ve three angels now: Social Media Industry, Advertising Industry, and Web Analytics Industry.