Tweet ‘O8

Our agency (Infuz) does a lot of work within the context of social media. And being a curious lot, we recently created a site that allows users to ‘listen’ to conversations of voters via Twitter. An interesting experiment to say the least.

Defining & Measuring Engagement – A Holy Grail? (part IV)

The 5 C’s of Engagement
Fundamentally, engagement is a state of deeply occupied attention. This may or may not include active elements of involvement and participation. For example, I might find a video highly engaging, although watching is pretty much a passive experience. Playing games, creating digital art, and messaging friends are good examples of active engagement.

I categorize digital engagements/experiences by 5 Cs

• Captivation
• Conversation
• Collaboration
• Creation
• Commerce

Captivation is often a passive form of engagement: watching videos, listening to music, or viewing images. It’s important to understand there is a strong qualitative factor that separates apathetic media consumption from captivation. This is one reason I feel ‘time spent’ is an inadequate measure of true engagement. Ten minutes of exposure to second-rate content doesn’t carry twice the weight of a compelling experience lasting five minutes. I also consider single-player games, demonstrations, and e-learning applications interactive platforms for captivation.

Conversation is a highly interactive form of engagement and a fundamental characteristic of social media. Posting, commenting, and messaging are means for users to engage others in opinions and ideas. From a brand marketer’s perspective, conversations are a powerful force that can drive product awareness, consideration and affinity. Like captivation, conversations that are entertaining, emotional, or otherwise provide value are more engaging than conversations that don’t.

Collaboration through wikis, multi-player games, and work applications are other examples of engagement. Brands have only scratched the surface in building collaborative experiences that let consumers not only interact with each other, but with a brand in creating something interesting.

Creation is a form of engagement that encompasses two separate activities: making and sharing. Digital toys, drawing and music applications are just a few examples of platforms that allow users to make their own creations. Product customization and visualization features also fall into this category. Media sharing platforms that allow users to post and share images, video, and digital documents overlap the creation and conversation experience.

Commerce might be the most powerful form of engagement. The seemingly prosaic process of shopping and purchasing is often one of the most memorable interactions we ever have with a brand. Likewise, the experiential factors of seeking product information, quotes, and customer service have a critical impact on conversion and affinity.

Next time: Are all engagements created equal?

Defining & Measuring Engagement – A Holy Grail? (part III)

What is “engagement” anyway?

Engagement means something a little different to everyone. Here are just a few examples:

ARF (Advertising Research Foundation) – “Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.”

This definition is a bit confusing and sounds more like a branding goal than a description of a user experience. Isn’t “turning on a prospect to a brand idea” the goal of most advertising? If so, does engagement simply mean ‘advertising enhanced with surrounding context’?

The ARF definition is also very broad and includes three qualitative variables that would require sophisticated (if not expensive) measurement methods.  How do you measure “turning on”, “enhanced”, and “context”?

Steve Hall of Adrants – “Time Spent (with medium) + Response Rate (average CTR, letters to editor, subscription/renewal rates, number of comments left on a blog) + Average Ad/Content Recall Rates + Uptick in Measured Brand Metric”

Steve admittedly didn’t spend much time whipping up this formula, but it’s definitely more tangible than the ARF definition. Unfortunately the variables Steve offers raise important questions about the qualitative aspects of measuring engagement.

•  ‘time spent’ – Are extremely compelling interactions that take little time less valuable than moderately compelling activities that take more time?
• “response rates” – I assume Steve believes engagement with publisher content provides value to the advertiser. As discussed earlier, this probably isn’t the case.  Also, ‘response rates’ as a metric assumes the last interaction before a “response” is always most valuable. We still don’t know if that is true.
• “recall rates” -  I can vividly recall many ads I do not like, as well as ads for brands I do not buy. That said, recall is still a useful measurement of attention and awareness.

Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified – “Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals.”

Eric’s formula of engagement is a decent framework for publishers and brand site managers, but doesn’t provide much guidance for creating a universal advertising metric.

The other problem with formula is also strength; each component can be weighted to fit what each publisher believes to be most important. As a result, “engagement” would never become a quantifiable constant that can be used to measure one publisher against another.

Many types of engagement
All definitions of engagement illustrate another challenge: there are many activities and experiences that can be considered engagement. Peterson’s formula demonstrates that publishers can readily establish a consistent, formulaic metric representing numerous activities. For advertisers, this isn’t so easy.

A single campaign can simultaneously span many touch-points, each offering a different set of possible activities. And this undoubtedly changes with each subsequent campaign.

 

Next time: The five Cs of engagement

Defining & Measuring Engagement – A Holy Grail? (part II)

Publishers and advertisers view engagement differently
Advertising supported publishers and corporate/brand site managers have always used web analytics to measure basic forms of user engagement, e.g. number of visitors, page views, time spent, etc. These measures also provide publishers with immediate feedback on traffic levels, and ultimately, the trend of available impressions that could be sold.

 

As Internet users began spending more time with high bandwidth content and Web 2.0 applications, publishers soon realized revenue models based on pages served wasn’t such a great idea. Some even theorized users of this content might be more valuable to advertisers.

 

Advertisers already knew rich media outperformed standard banner ads in both branding effectiveness and CTRs, so it was easy to conclude that high bandwidth content and social media experiences would provide similar value.

 

Many managers of brand sites and interactive marketing researchers successfully identified correlations between site metrics such as repeat visits, time spent, and page views and brand metrics. Unfortunately the traffic on most brand sites is relatively small, thus difficult to move the needle in a big way. Brand marketers are increasingly dependant on high traffic publishers and ad networks to connect with new consumers.

 

The wall between advertisement and publisher content is high on most ad supported sites, as it should be. However, banner blindness is now an unspoken truth and the primary goal for most online advertisers today is to simply get a user’s attention.

 

In many ways, advertisers and publishers compete for attention – this is nothing new, but if a publisher is successful in growing highly engaged users, doesn’t that engagement come at the expense of the advertiser?

 

Advertisers are primarily interested in getting consumers to engage with their brand, not in increasing ad exposures to users who are engaged in doing something else. Too often brand engagement is peripheral to the engagement experience.

 

Next time: What is “engagement” anyway?

Defining & Measuring Engagement – A Holy Grail? (part I)

I’ve written a long diatribe on our industry’s attempts to define and measure engagement. I’ll post my thoughts here in bite-sized chunks over the coming weeks.

Engagement is still a hot topic in the interactive marketing community, even after years trying to define, measure, and monetize it. I want to take a closer look at the challenges we’ve faced and even offer some suggestions.

Advertising media is most often valuated and purchased using ‘exposure metrics’ like GRPs, impressions, and time spent. Although brand marketers have been long frustrated to translate audience exposure into a real ROI, these metrics have become both familiar and grudgingly accepted yardsticks of media value.

By the early 90’s most of us believed the experiential nature of interactive media could offer far more value to advertisers than simply exposing consumers to a commercial message. In the years since, broadband penetration and the explosion of user generated content increased our interest in packaging engagement as a metric.

The barriers we face
After much discussion and debate, we still find ourselves unable to address these key challenges:

• Engagement means something different to ad supported publishers, brand site managers, and advertisers
• Too many activities can be considered “engagement”
• The value of engagement is highly dependant on qualitative factors

Next time: Publishers and advertisers view engagement differently

Keepin’ the day job

Had a great time at the first annual Gateway Interactive Marketing Association (GIMA) golf tournament this week. Unfortunately my golf game is right up there with my slam-dunking skills. My foursome was (left to right) Hafiz Huda (CD extraordinaire @ MomentumWW), Nate the “permalancer” (designer in indentured servitude @MomentumWW), and Paul, a newbie @Outrider. Our score? Ummmm…we didn’t break anything valuable.

What will change the game for digital creative?

I attended iMediaConnection Breakthrough ‘08 back in March and participated in some taped Q&As on a number of topics. This video was just posted and includes thoughts on the future of digital creative from a variety of perspectives. My segment begins @7:22.

Sorry, WordPress can’t accomodate Brightcove embeds.

Guitar Duo

Fripp and Belew of King Crimson fame is the best rock guitar duo I’ve ever seen.

Generational brand loyalty

My family now owns a fleet of five Hondas and it occurred to me that I don’t really consider myself an emotionally invested loyalist. Hondas and Toyota are both in my consideration set – price and availability are the tie breakers. Honda just happens to be on a winning streak lately.

So why are Hondas and Toyotas always in my (and the country’s) consideration set? They consistently deliver on the basics: reliability, durability, and low cost of operation. Change their oil every 3,000 miles and they seem to run forever – my Civic has 245,xxx on the odo.

When our friends in the media report on the woes of the domestic auto manufacturers, they always surmise the salvation is a breakthrough product, unusual styling or whiz bang gadgetry. Honda and Toyota built their kingdoms on none of this.

Automotive brand loyalty is a powerful thing. Families pass down their brand preferences to their kids, so delivering value on high ticket, low frequency products is incredibly important. Advertising and promotion is less significant because “trial” is not in the automotive marketing vernacular.

Broadband video ad guidelines released

The IAB’s Broadband Committee just released guidelines for broadband video commercials online. Unfortunately they punted on the question of optimum length and ad effectiveness per content category.

I would also like the IAB to establish some guidelines regarding minimum interactivity options: clickability, video hot spots, and links to additional info. Leaving so much to publisher discretion isn’t going to do much to enhance production efficiency or ultimately drive user engagement.