Demystifying Online Engagement

By James Whatley

Last Friday, while all the cool kids were playing nice at our first ‘in-house’ Tuttle, I was dispatched to the NMA Live event: Demystifying Online Engagement

The event was an interesting one to say the least, with advertisers, media planners and buyers all discussing what kind of cost per engagement (CPE) models they should be working towards and what kind of results they should be expecting.

I went in with a slightly different angle.
My brief was as follows:

“Engagement Beyond Advertising: Identifying and Evaluating Engaged Customers in the Social Space”

First off, it’s important to establish what is meant by ‘the social space’. Social, more now than ever before, implies ‘online’. However, that’s not strictly true. Word of mouth is both an online and an offline activity. Conversations can happen EVERYWHERE.

And if conversations can happen everywhere then people can be engaged anywhere.

But what do I mean by engagement? Each speaker had their own interpretation. For me, an engagement isn’t just simply clicking through on a banner ad, nor is it really watching the video that rolls after said click.

True engagement is about the beginnings of something much bigger. The beginnings of conversation.

Whether that conversation be between brands and people or between people and people, what does it mean to be truly ‘engaged’?

How many brands have to ‘engaged’ with today? How many people?
How and where?

This is something I’m going to have to come back to another time. The NMA has written up their thoughts on the subject (based on the presentations from the day), but for now, take a look at the slides below and let me know what you think -

NMA Live – Demystifying Engagement

View more presentations from James Whatley.

There are some notes that go with each slide but they can only be viewed over on slideshare.

As ever, I’d be interested to hear what you think.

What does engagement mean to you?
Where are your social spaces?
When are you truly engaged?

Like this?

Brought into the world on Monday, January 25th, 2010 and filed under Events, Stats & Research.

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  • http://thenokianetwork.com Steve Rowlands

    To me, the quote from Blake Chandlee sums it up nicely.

    The WOM engagement strategy is not to be sniffed at. I was very undecided (with a couple of other devices) about my current Nokia handset before I bought it. Your recommendations gave me the confidence to purchase the N86.

    I recommended my friend get an E72. This was not an easy task as he is the most fussy man in Europe when it comes to phones, but he loves it. Just the other day I also showed him the new ‘free’ Ovi Maps, which he now has installed. He has no interest in the ‘mobile phone news’, and ordinarily would not have even heard about the Ovi Maps announcement were it not for me spreading the news via WOM…..

    I know for a fact he has now taken up this WOM mantle with regard his new ‘free’ GPS, and has told all his mates.

    Result.

  • http://whatleydude.com James Whatley

    Steve, that is an awesome comment.

    Thank you very much. Glad to hear you’re spreading the word.

    J.

  • Tristan Bailey

    There is a good engadgement metric for blogs of ratio of monthly uniques to rss/repeat visitors. And number of comments per post and per month. As this is a regular and engadged audince.

    Similar with podcasts. Number of comments and competition entries or calls to action from audio to web form submitted.

    For social engagement I would rank as the 3 or 4 th action with a brand or the ratio of actions over time. Actions a day or week. For regular use. You could even add 3rd part. Actions:average duration:duration
    3actions:4mins:week
    or me Twitter today
    5update feed and 20mins read today
    plus 3rt plus 1form plus 2tweet plus 2reply
    13action:1hour:day engadge with Twitter
    13:60:840 in mins

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