Commentary
Influence Is The New Engagement
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, September 1, 2010
And as an industry currency, or at least a denominator, he says that "influence is the new engagement."
By that, Rogal means that the concept of influence has picked up where the long-waged industry debate around "engagement" left off.
Rogal noted that a few years back, when he was on the publisher side, he spent much of his time developing "indices" to explain the engagement of his media properties with the target audiences of various categories and advertisers he was selling to.
"We never really settled on one official definition for engagement, but that's not a bad thing," he said. "It actually created a lot of flexibility of tailoring engagement for what the specific business objective is."
So where do we stand with influence? Well, according to Rogal, it's still a work in progress.
"As an industry, we're really struggling with what influence is. We know what it is not," he said.
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
Joe, Have you heard of our company (www.wildfireplatform.com)? We operate a mobilization software platform and have found that engagement & measuring impact is the key to making a campaign successful.
We've found that the most successful campaigns usually offer some type of prize and a system to measure influence. The idea that a politician or nonprofit can now measure an individuals impact by "donating" facebook/twitter status updates, commenting on pro-opposition articles, reading articles, etc. Influence for these industries are no longer measured solely based on donations.
We've also seen for-profit companies & entertainment groups finding extreme value is measuring and tracking who their "most influential" raving fans are. For example who is more important for a company 1) a customer that invites 214 of his friends to join a campaign and 30 of them join the campaign OR 2) the customer that invites 15 of his friends and all 15 sign-up on the campaign?
You see where I am going... but as more marketers see the value in measuring not only surface results, but also influence will they have much more dept in id'ing their biggest (and most influential) customers/fans.
-John Cason
@johncason