Engagement measuring; it’s not the answer to everything

We recently held our annual company conference, a week where we connect 135 people from four continents to share ideas, insights and successes. We spent a lot of time talking about our customers and reminding ourselves of their realities, and a hot topic was that of measuring engagement.

But just what is engagement? I believe Brian Haven from Forrester has given the best definition of engagement: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. I like this definition because it comes the closest to incorporating the negative affect that high engagement can have. Jeff Jarvis was deeply engaged with Dell in 2005, but as a vigilante, not an activist - and quickly triggered dozens of other complaints, leading to a negative brand affect. The other reason I like this definition is that each of the elements is measured by collecting both online and offline data.

Recently, engagement measurement has come to mean something else, and unfortunately is focused on the digital channel. An example of how not to do it is the way it is being used by Microsoft’s Engagement Mapping (EMAP) approach, i.e. a method of looking at the impact of all ad exposures and what contribution was made to the final sale, not just attributing a conversion to the last click. While a useful line of analysis, there are significant problems with the approach:

· First, it allows advertisers/agencies to make discretionary assumptions about the expected impact of particular attributes (ad size, creative type etc) in the absence of any statistical evidence that their assumptions are valid.

· Second, to do engagement mapping properly one has to collect a massive amount of data and one has to integrate all channels. Doing engagement mapping with only a few preceding exposures and without including all your channels will simply give you a different partial view, as opposed to the real big picture.

· Third, measuring engagement is not only about measuring ad exposures, but is really about measuring intangibles – brand interaction, intimacy, involvement, influence and ultimately commitment.

Engagement measuring as defined by Microsoft and other vendors is really just a way to justify spend. A final point, engagement (involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence) is something marketers have been measuring in various forms for years. The challenge we face today is to incorporate digital and figure out how cope with the data.