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RSSSEO sees engagement as the balance of building a site that is SEO friendly yet with enough creativity and content that engages the consumer. The group talks about Web 2.0 and the use of blogs and forums as means of building keyword density or visibility to your site. They'll talk about SEO-friendly blogs like Google Blogger, Social Bookmarking: Digg Delicious, Reddit and Stumpleupon. They'll speak of microsites and the use of "unbranded" keywords and how important they can be in link building. Also, how content from RSS feeds can be picked up by search engines, allowing multiple URLs to be crawled at once. They'll talk about how companies are posting newsletters online these days as a means of adding indexable pages to their site. They'll talk about how Flash and Ajax are great content presenters, but how little value they bring to your sites ranking, since the rich pages aren't indexable.
The Advanced Optimization group sees engagement as the means of building an optimized "path" for the consumer to complete their task. Akin to user experience, but in a measurable way of testing landing pages, looking at path completion, form abandonment, and multivariate means of testing many elements along a single task.
The Business Intelligence group sees engagement as a method to behaviorally target a site experience and serve ads based on where you've been and what you've done. Engagement is not just about your site, it's about how people are exposed to your brand, business, and interactions on third-party sites as well. They'll speak about how you can measure site recency, frequency of visitation, pathing, visitation to key sections, purchases, downloads, session time and registrations and downloads. They'll talk about the art of understanding the customer state, test and control segmentation, creative optimization based on these interactions and how you should look at this past shear acquisition to the repeat site visitor in building onsite and on-network persistency to your brand and message through proper targeting.
The Email Solutions group, (my group) sees engagement as a means of building a connection between the consumer and your business. If I hear "send the right message at the right time to the right person" one more time, I'll take CRM out of my professional vocabulary. Engagement isn't just about message timing or targeting, it's about behaviorally understanding what connections your prospect, customer or business partner can possibly have with your brand through the email channel and the influence of each.
Your challenge, from a business perspective, is how to monetize this and understand how much stimuli and enticement is needed to create the most value for the consumer and your business. It's a value exchange. It includes all the elements listed by the other channels; building great sites, ensuring a consumer can find your site, enabling the social need to share content and experiences, fostering the conversion path so it's a seamless experience, while building marketing programs that optimize every interaction on and off site.
When collectively discussed, engagement seems so reasonable and attainable. If we all end with the same conclusion of what engagement means, then why do so many interactive strategies have so few connections between the channels? If you are confused as a marketer, imagine how confused your consumer will be, with disparate experiences that don't build on each other.
RSS FEEDS
Unfortunately, so many of us get used to the metrics and analytics of our own specific industry, and forget about the big picture.
The SEO firm, that writes garbage articles that reflect badly, or the branding agency that doesn't check if the call center is giving crappy service that sais "your branding is a lie", or the PPC guy who lazily doesn't check his landing pages vs. the brand positioning the agency is pushing.
We all do it, even those of us that care about the customer... The bottom line is that it's about the people. The metrics are simply tools that we use to see whether we are really helping our customers? Are the messages we are sending relevant? Can we make money off of the service we provide - or should our company be in a different niche?
Our challenge is to go beyond our own niche expertise, and learn from the salesmen, agencies, SEO guys, call center reps, and everyone else in between what our customers are about. (Did I forget the customers themselves???!)
First you've got to grab the OPBs' attention - and then get them involved.
But in the end I think the only way to measure engagement - the only way that makes any difference for a business person, anyway - is if attention and engagement turn into an action of some kind.
If the objective is to elicit some kind of beneficial action from the OPB then engagement may begin to look the same to different groups.
cheers, t.
http://www.tourismkeys.ca/blog.html