Measuring Engagement

Last Friday I presented at the NMAlive event* on Online Engagement Demysitified event, running with the hopeful title “How Engagement Measurement Will Change the World” (see slides above).

As ever, it was a good opportunity to revisit the theme of engagement measurement and think about how we talk about it at iCrossing.

We’ve effectively spent the last four years looking at how you quantify and understand the concept of engagement. It’s only with evidence and actionable analysis that the idea of connected brands, organisations in touch and in dialogue with with their customers and stakeholders online becomes real.

Evaluating engagement has become increasing sophisticated. Right now the social media analysts in the UK are re-mixing the whole idea of search and social media data as a research discipline in incredibly exciting ways for clients as diverse as banks and soft drinks brands. Our work in this area has been profiled in two Forrester case studies on our projects for Channel 4 and Toyota.

The technology has moved at an incredible rate too. We started with social network analysis visualisation and a lot of manual work on collating data. Over time the expertise of out technical department, performance insight experts and insights from our journalist team have all been fed into new approaches to using our own tools and those of technology platforms like Brandwatch and Buzzmetrics. We remain open-minded as the the best technology and metrics mix for any particular campaign or brand.

What has remained a constant though for the past two years or so, is the basic framework that we use when developing an evaluation, iCrossing’s Framework for Measuring Evaluation (see diagram).

Three things we have learned about evaluating engagement are: Read more…

At iCrossing we often talk to our clients (and prospective clients) about the possible benefits of getting their staff blogging and engaging with customers via a “corporate blog”. Of course, it’s not the right move for every organisation – but for those with an open culture with a high level of trust in their people, blogging can be a very effective way of showing your customers (and anyone who is curious about what your organisation is all about) just exactly who you are and why you’re better than your competitors.

I was struck this week by a sad example of this in an unexpected format when I happened to find the Borders Insider blog on The Bookseller website. This is an unofficial, anonymous blog written by a member of staff about what is happening inside the shops now that they’ve gone into liquidation. At first glance, you might think that the post entitled “Running on empty” is a very good example of why so many organisations are scared stiff of the idea of letting their people connect directly with the world via a corporate blog.  At first sight this might not be the best advert for corporate blogging – for starters it’s hosted by another site altogether, and the quotes like the one below are a PR’s nightmare aren’t they?

“We are running on empty, all we do is tidy. Everyday we feel less and less like booksellers and more and more like caretakers. The massive jolt that is administration, which was at first in a strange way energising, feels more and more like a dead weight. There’s only so many times you can explain the gift card redemption rule to angry people, without it getting extremely wearying.”

And yet, if you read a bit further, and then go on to read the comments below this post, what you’re left with is a very strong impression of the knowledge and passion of the Borders’ staff. And the very strong connection they had with their loyal customers.

“Please remember the peope who are treating you so poorly are not your customers. We are still here, devastated by what has happened, and what is happening, but you will see less of us now and more of the bargain hunters only dimly aware that this was once a book shop. My famiy and I have been going to Borders nearly every week since it opened. My wife and I found and decided on our childrens names, planned our wedding and rewarded our children at Borders. The failures have not been yours. If you were to think from scratch of how to compete with Supermarkets and the internet, you would come up with Borders. All the events, especially for children, and your enthusiasm contributed to an overall positive experience with books. You are not booksellers but ambassadors for literature. There are a lot of children who will never forget you and will benefit from your efforts.”

And this isn’t just limited to the store that this commentator frequented. I went into the Brighton branch of Borders this morning and was able to witness for myself the dedicated team of staff there still helping their customers find what they want amongst the jumble sale piles of books. That’s the kind of genuine customer advocacy that no PR stunt or press release can fake. And that’s why, I would argue, if you think your organisation has a special kind of chemistry with its customers and stakeholders, and a unique kind of engagement amongst its employees, a corporate blog is an excellent way of sharing it with the world.

IMAGE by Flickr user markhillary published under CC licence

‘Here’s the thing’:

Social is not a distinct entity, you can’t ‘buy’ the channel, nor can you fit it into a sales funnel. The ‘media’ bit is whatever people want to make it. Some UGC amazing, some just noise. Some brands pollute the commons, some try to understand the new enviroment, earn permission, and then participate. The bit that agencies struggle with is the $$ (see Phil Buxton’s post on Twitter recently). If it ain’t for selling anything why is anyone going to spend their drastically reduced marketing budget on it. So here goes:

Social is for selling. We’re all selling something, be it opinions, thoughts or attention. Social is the biggest platform in the history of humankind for selling, and we are all invited to pitch.

Brands that want to sell things that people do not want may find this is difficult medium – it’s shockingly new, hugely complex, truly massive, and moving faster than most of us can comprehend.

Selling is anything that helps create a great perception, feeling or thought about a brand. Whether it motivates us to go out and immediately buy is another matter. If, through social outreach, we can help customers access brands, understand their products and get involved in developing the next superbrand - then this must at some point help to support price, market share and ultimately profitability.

If the bottom line is the bottom line, as marketers we need to answer how it can contribute to the commercial success of a organisation. If social is a valuable way of behaving, then it is valuable to everyone.

Social for a car maker provides a context for making better products in the future. For people everywhere it also provdes a rich utility value that can end-up in better holidays, buying the safest infant milk, or banking with a company that cares about the community it operates within.

Social has the power to add everything to the bottom line. It will make and break huge companies and change marketing forever. If social ‘ain’t for selling’ then brands cannot be intimately interwoven into our daily lives. I think that the best and worst ones help form the deepest reaches of our society.

For this reason alone, social is for selling. Now let’s go and measure that.

Image Credit: Flickr User terinea

Chairing Chinwag Live’s Social Media ROI panel debate at E-commerce Expo last week was fascinating for a number of reasons – not least for the amount of people trying to pack themselves into a small space.

The debate featured some social media luminaries: Robin Grant from We Are Social; Stuart Bruce from Wolfstar; Helen Lawrence, social media planner at Dare; and Alex Burmaster at Nielsen Online. But the driver of the conversation (the influencer if you will) turned out to be Ankur Shah, founder of Techlightenment, who, as Robin described, was coming at things from a direct response-focused angle.

The great thing about Ankur’s input was that it dragged conversation about social media out of (again, as Robin put it) ‘fluffy’ objectives and into its value in terms of hard, lead-generation targets.

Read more…

Finding out if pages on your site have been tagged on del.icio.us provides an excellent metric for measuring how useful your site is to your users. With the assumption being if they are tagging it, they are loving it!

You can check if a webpage has been tagged in delicious by visiting del.icio.us/url and typing in the webpage you want to check. The results show which pages have been tagged, by which users and using what tags. A RSS feed is also provided so that you can get notifications of when a particular page is tagged.

This information is great as it allows you to understand which pages are being useful to your website’s audience, but it’s only possible to manually check whether individual pages have been tagged. Del.icio.us provides no way to automatically check every page on a website.

Using Yahoo Pipes, however, we have created a tool that can check an entire site for del.iou.us tags, and provide an RSS feed to alert when new pages are tagged.

The pipe can be found here. Due to some of the limitations of yahoo pipes it will only work on sites that have fewer than 1,000 tags. For example it won’t work on bbc.co.uk.

We hope you find the tool useful – if you have any questions on how it works please send us an email or leave a comment below.