Are We Tilting At Engagement?

Posted by Robert Rose on Dec 7, 2010

Do you like the TV Show Gossip Girl?   I’m going to take a wild guess that the answer is ‘no’.  If you did, you’d be watching it – and earlier this year Gossip Girl finished the 2009-2010 season in 125^th place.  This makes it ostensibly near last place of all broadcast television shows.  I mean that’s just about as bad as it gets.

So, let’s say you’re the “marketing person” in charge of getting Gossip Girl renewed.  You need to convince advertisers that somehow putting their money into Gossip Girl is better than putting it into the 120+ options that rank higher.   What would you do?  Well, what if I told you that you could walk into the office of the people in charge of such things and claim that Gossip Girl is not only a top 20 show – but that it ranks #14 of all broadcast television shows.

How About We Measure “Engagement”?

That’s what Optimedia showed with their Content Power Ratings.  They measure “engagement” of television programming.  The research ranks TV shows based on what they determine to be levels of engagement with the brand.  They combine Facebook Fan Page ‘likes’, plus Nielsen BuzzMetrics and other data sources to come up with the “most comprehensive multi-platform audience rating system” (note the quotes).   And, using that metric a show like Lost which ranks 35^th in Nielsen ratings – jumps to #2 behind American Idol in terms of “buzz” and “engagement”.  And, our job at Gossip Girl is now safe – because it jumps from lowly 125^th place to number 14 of all shows.

But what does that number really mean?  Is the Gossip Girl brand really commanding a more “engaging” experience than 60 Minutes?  But, more importantly, are we starting to lose sight of the real value of engagement because we’re not sure of who or why we’re trying to engage in the first place?

Of course, as marketers, we’re paid to sell consumers something.  As David Ogilvy said – “when I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative,’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

To Fight For The Right, Without Question Or Pause…

I’m noticing an eerily similar trend just starting to emerge with efforts around content marketing, social media engagement and terms like web engagement management.   As the pressures to provide ROI and some kind of analytics strategy around these efforts grow, the methodologies are exploding in really odd ways.  And it’s both confusing and confounding managers to explain the efficacy of the strategy in general.

In short – this overwhelming need we have to assign some kind of new numerical value to the process, while we move in “real-time” is not helping us to answer the real question: Who are we *really* trying to engage and to what end.

As I’m sure we expected, skeptics are starting to ask smart questions.  Over on Ad Age’s CMO Strategy blog –  Jonathan Salem Baskin recently asked if the Lure of Social Media was dangerous and nothing really new.  He struggled with the logic and became “more convinced that we’re misreading history and present circumstance.”  Interestingly, the comments on this post mostly focused on one side or the other (engagement is amazing vs. it’s all a bunch of bullshit) without ever wondering if it’s just okay to ask the question.

From WMD’s to IED’s

So you may or may not remember that I once said that some marketers use Analytics as “WMD “– or a weapon of mass delusion.   My point there was that when marketers use Analytics to try and prove value, rather than gain insight – they’ll quickly delude themselves into believing that they’re successful.

Unfortunately that’s the trend I see developing with “Engagement”.   I’m seeing marketers and agencies literally change the definition of “engagement” from month to month to fit what they’re seeing across their content.  They go through the process of developing personas, develop their content strategy, define their channels – and then start to measure engagement success based on whatever number starts to go up and to the right the fastest (a Twitter follower drive is a common one).  In short they start developing what I’m going to start calling IED’s – Integrated Engagement Delusions.

What happens?  Well it’s not soon after that the metric fails for one reason or another (are we surprised that the Twitter followers are all spammers?), the content marketing experiment is called a failure – and the whole idea of Social Media Engagement, Content Marketing or other program is blamed.

This is where the skeptics have every right to doubt the efficacy of a social web program, content marketing or engagement strategy.

Baskin is right when he says: “Social behavior isn’t unique to technology; it’s just that we have partial visibility into some aspects of how people converse now.”

That’s the key. Yes, of course conversations about brands have been happening forever.  Yes, of course we’ve been conversing with our customers and prospects about our products since the very beginning – and helping them through a buying process.  The difference now is that the social web makes the creation and sharing of that content (conversation) so much more frictionless.   Our Moms are using Social Media now – Our nieces and nephews are using content and searching and sharing.  They can both engage, and be engaged like never before.   And, yes we now have the opportunity to manage it more fluidly than before.

To Dream The Impossible Dream

I certainly don’t believe that focusing on engagement is an imaginary challenge.   Regardless if our business is to make hubcap fasteners at the local level, manage a global Fortune 100 services brand or a launch a single marketing entrepreneur – our businesses must embrace the challenge of engaging our audiences more fully.

Even if our only purpose is utilize the Social Web or content marketing to better understand what our consumers care about – I think it holds the potential for tremendous marketing value for any business.   Bad metrics, applied with poor methodologies, to unjustified efforts or glossed over goals will eventually unravel no matter how big, bright or shiny the new approach is.

I’m hopeful that, as digital marketers, we’re moving past the point where we think a business should be immediately, and blindly sold on having a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a thought leadership positioned blog tomorrow.  Let’s face it – any marketing strategy that doesn’t have “create a customer” at the end of its process is a distraction.

So, Gossip Girl’s 2010 ratings are down almost 30% this season vs. last – so it would seem that while that one calculation of “engagement” may be an interesting metric to follow – it doesn’t seem to translate (in this business anyway) into an expanded customer base for the product.    But on the other hand, a small five person non-profit agency used content and social media “buzz” to generate $62,000 and a new community to monetize.

Neither of those prove anything really.   The success or failure of Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing and “engagement” is still being written….

At the end of Man of La Mancha, as the Inquisition enters the prison to take Cervantes off to his trial, the prisoners have already found him not guilty and they return his manuscript.     It is, of course, his unfinished novel.   As Cervantes and his servant go to face the judge – they swell with courage, and their eyes gleam – as the prisoners all together sing The Impossible Dream.

And the world will be better for this –  That one man, scorned and covered with scars,  - Still strove, with his last ounce of courage,  To reach … the unreachable star