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:

1. It can drive creative: Good evaluation of engagement delivers data and insight that constitute “live research”, which in turn – with the right processes and platforms in places – allows “live creative”, creative played out in an agile way, responding to how content is being received and re-used. It was this realisation that allowed an insight from web analytics to inspire the hyper-miling creative in the Toyota iQ campaign which was the outstanding success in that project.
2. User-centred perspective is key: Measurement mentality is shaped still by the channel media world we come from. The emphasis is too often on simply the brand’s and its marketing messages’ “impact” or “penetration” of target consumers. Colleagues from iCrossing’s user experience team have ensured that user behaviours and how they change during engagement have remained our focus in developing measurement approaches for engagement. This has also meant that we have been able to step out of the sales-funnel model of measuring (which ends with a sale) and create a model in which a purchase is an elevated but not always the ultimate form of engagement.
3. Stories+numbers: “Stories and numbers” have become a mantra for us over the past couple of years. It helps us to remember that both are equally important to meaningful measurement. Numbers without stories don’t travel far in organisations, don’t affect change, inspire action, without stories that make the meaning easy for people to grasp and communicate to others.

This last point gives us the justification for the title. As Alan Moore put it, “social data is the black gold of the 21st century” and it is engagement evaluation where we are closest to unlocking the value of this data to organisations. The insights and data (stories and numbers) that are being created need to travel further in organisations than the marketing and PR functions. They are so valuable that they create the business case for wiring organisations differently, having the connections between “departments” like PR and customer care stronger, the lines between “divisions” blurred and eroded.

Being able to understand and act on engagement data will change how brands – and more broadly all organisations – function.

* If you’re not familiar NMAlive’s a particularly useful format for speakers and delegates alike. Here’s what I like about it:

• Concise and well -priced: The events are on a Friday for the morning only – it’s easy to justify a morning out of the office.
• Short-lead time: Events tend to be organised about six weeks out, which means the topic is fresh – in this instance related to big brands using Cost Per Engagement (CPE) as a means of setting payment for publishers.
• Mix of people: It seemed all parts of the media/marketing complex were represented well: clients, agencies, media owners and obeservers. It makes for interesting, direct discussion (as does the size – about 100 people max).

It’s a winning formula I’d hope to see emulated by other publishers / event-organisers.

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How engagement measurement will change the world

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

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The sad story of the Borders “corporate blog”

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.

Post from: Connect

Social is for selling

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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.

While we all see that connecting with customers ‘at their place’ – their social online networks – is a great thing to be doing, measuring the value of these kinds of things is nigh on impossible. iCrossing as it happens is doing the best job I’ve seen of seeking to ‘measure ‘engagement’ and thus place a benchmark on the ‘success’ that investment in social media is having. But, as we enter recession, there’s no doubt there’s a new sense of urgency about how we can get social media to deliver on lead-gen objectives.

Ankur’s examples were, essentially, highly-targeted ads in social media spaces like Facebook. Yes, as social shifts, tools like Twitter are very interesting – he sort of argued – but Twitter hasn’t worked out a way of monetising itself yet, let alone advertisers.

As Alex Burmaster pointed out, the costs of measuring softer objectives like social media visits and engagement are prohibitive to anyone but large brands, so where does that leave the small and medium-sized retailer sites that make up a huge amount of the market and who currently divert the bulk of their spend to search?

The room at the debate was to some extent made up of these people and it was clear from their questions that what they want to hear is exactly what Ankur was driving at: ‘How do I use it to make sales?’

Well, I hope you weren’t expecting any answers from this post – panel debates rarely deliver those. If forced I’d suggest using Twitter/RSS to push out opted-in sales messages as one opportunity. But what we did identify is that, as one questioner put it – ‘my children are using user-generated content to make purchase decisions’. Therefore we have to work out a way to engage more directly in those places.

I remember the last digital crash well. Two years covering entirely bad news tends to stick around in one’s mind and soul. But, while all that was going on, a little thing called GoTo (which became Overture) was taking root. All the while that dotcoms were collapsing, search – the ultimate direct-response model – was keeping the market alive and changing the way we think about advertising.

Now this recession is here, there is a bitter pill we have to swallow: that social media needs to discover a similarly effective model to turn this challenge into an opportunity. For, if it can claim budget share by delivering ROI in the hard times, then, when we emerge from the gloom, it will find itself in a strong position.

If it can’t deliver a direct path to hard targets soon, then you fear it faces a couple of years of hibernation until advertisers are willing to think ‘fluffy’ once more.

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Social media faces some tough questions

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.

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How to check if a website has been tagged on del.icio.us