Engagement is a two-way street
Max Kalehoff writes of marketing’s conundrum with new media in an interesting piece in today’s MediaPost Online Spin. He laments the lack of any clear definition of a term that’s been bandied about for the last couple of years, engagement. Marketers are hoping we’ll all agree on what that means, and Kalehoff has done a nice job of summarizing the problem. The commentary cites Robert Scoble’s contributions to the discussion:
Scott Karp (Publishing 2.0) correctly noted how new-media people “may be ahead of the curve on formats and hip notions like ‘conversation,’ but they’re actually playing catch-up on the deep, intractable problems of media– like how to prove the value.” Scoble validated this, but, to my delight, he also tackled the monumental elephant in the room. Yes, the one that so many avoid: the connection among engagement, action and sales.Scoble wrote: “So, why should engagement matter to an advertiser? Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale. Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400. My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today[’s], but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention. How could we measure audience engagement?”
There is no be-all solution to measuring engagement; heck, the advertising and media industry is having a hard enough time agreeing on a definition! But the lack of action, sales or a defined business outcome in all the pondering is a problem.
“Marketing” is a one-to-many term that can usually be interchanged with “manipulating.” This is what marketers do; they use creativity and statistics to move, drive or otherwise cause people to take an action they might not have taken otherwise. It’s called sales, and it’s the most essential tool of our capitalist culture. The more money you have, the more you can sell, because you can hire smart people to craft sophisticated “marketing” and put it everywhere.
I also think “marketing” assumes a mass, whether that is assembled in a television audience or through millions of direct mail pieces. After all, getting your message to as many people as possible is the mission.
But Media 2.0 turns this on its head, and this is why I don’t think “marketing” people will ever come to agreement on any new term or metric (a fancy word for a measurement guess) that can be used to play one-to-many in this new world.
Google provides many definitions of the term “engagement,” but most involve the connecting of one thing with another. It is decidedly not a one-to-many concept, and that’s why we cannot twist it into something that fits contemporary marketing. If we could, it wouldn’t be engagement.
Which brings us back to Kalehoff’s “monumental elephant in the room.” The reason we’re having problems connecting action and sales with engagement is that those trying to make the connection want it to be something that supports the status quo — a “new” and measurable, therefore manipulable, mass marketing metric. This is the same kind of blindness that keeps media companies (remember, they’re “driven” by advertising) trying to pull Media 2.0 back into their model. It won’t work.
I want to see everybody succeed in the disruption, but if we’re going to do that, we’re going to have become a part of the disruption. Buzz Bruggeman’s 400 downloads thanks to Robert Scoble are a measure of the way those downloaders feel about Robert and that is engagement. It’s THEIR choice, not Robert’s, Buzz’s or anybody else’s, and that is what scares the crap out of marketers. After all, if the customers are in charge, who needs the marketers?
And here’s the marvelous simplicity of engagement: It’s a two-way street, and rather than wringing our hands over how to get people to engage with us (so that we can manipulate them), why don’t we spend our time engaging our customers? As the blogosphere has learned, that process begins with listening. When we honestly listen to customers, guess what happens? They’ll do our advertising for us.
As Steven Covey says, “You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into.”
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Attack of the hyperlocal outsiders
When I write that the real Media 2.0 business disruption for broadcasters is the personal media revolution fueled by outside internet pureplay companies, the assumption is that these people are after local advertising dollars. Gordon Borrell projects that as overall online ad revenues continue to increase, the split between local and national dollars will reach parity by 2009 (it’s about 70% national currently). In order for that to happen, local ad spending online will be exploding, and while this is good for local media, it’s also a target for the Googles, Yahoos and MySpaces of the world.
The big boys are either doing this themselves or buying up smaller companies who’ve created nice applications for the local space. Everywhere I look, I see new businesses springing up that are built to appeal to people at the local level, and this is a very dangerous proposition for incumbent local media players — many of whom think we have time to sort all of this out. We don’t.
One new entry into this space is Outside.in, a wonderfully conceived piece of software that has the potential to really disrupt local media. I’ll let my visionary friend George Johnson tell you about it:
It’s built around many of the driving principles and tools of the social web: blogs, geographic and category tags, providing users with tools to generate results that are as specific and relevant as possible, and the recognition that content, specifically hyperlocal content, has a long tail. The last conceit and core principle of outside.in is the most compelling part of the application. Johnson (founder Steven Johnson) explains:
Local news often has a long-shelf life. One thing both blogs and traditional newspapers share is that they are organized around time, with the latest news given priority. But a lot of neighborhood information is news that stays news: a parent’s comment about the science program at a local school is just as relevant six months after it was posted; a guide to gay-friendly bars could be useful for years. That’s why outside.in is designed not just as a “latest headlines” service; it’s also an evolving neighborhood encyclopedia, capturing all the things that have been said about specific places.Outside.in aggregates hyperlocal content (posts written by hyperlocal bloggers and tagged by geography)…And…is driven by select content written by authors with specific knowledge of what’s going on in their own back yard and a demonstrated ability to report it in a compelling way whether they’re amateur or professional.The result is a relevant and engaging experience driven by place.
We had better be paying attention to the thinking behind these types of projects, because it’s pure Media 2.0, and we need to do it better. Outside.in is a very cool piece of technology, but — at least for the time being — it suffers from the same thing that any pureplay local venture must address: the cost of marketing. Local incumbent companies aren’t restricted by this, so we have a (temporary) competitive advantage.George Johnson, by the way, has his own hyperlocal platform, Until Monday. He’s also behind Buffalo Rising, another local new media site.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that Google will make more advertising revenues in the UK this year than Channel 4, the second largest broadcaster in the country.
The US search engine group would “extract” about £900m in advertising from the UK market in 2006, (channel 4 chief executive) Andy Duncan estimated, compared with Channel 4’s annual advertising income of about £800m.“People need to wake up and realise that this is not just a cyclical issue. There is deep structural change taking place,” he told the Financial Times.
“If we want to protect the fantastic legacy of UK broadcasting, we need to wake up to this sooner rather than later.”
Broadcasters could not afford to be “in denial” about the “fundamental change” to their industry, Mr Duncan warned, likening the phenomenon to global warming.
The threat to all broadcasters is evident. We either move into and seize Media 2.0 at the local level, or, to paraphrase Ross Perot, the sucking sound we hear will be “our” revenues leaving our markets (bound for Mountain View, CA, home of Google).And I will say it again: we can spend our resources on multi-platform distribution opportunities all we want, but it doesn’t address the real threat we’re all facing. Remember what my friend Bob Papper from Ball State University says, “Television didn’t kill magazines, because they took their readers; they killed magazines, because they took their advertising.” Think about it.
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