Customer Engagement: The New PR Metric
Are your customers and investors “engaged?”
June is apparently the most popular time to get married. So in the remaining days of the month, it seems therefore appropriate to discuss one of the hottest topics in the advertising industy – customer engagement.
It is a term gaining currency here at EarthLink and at companies wishing to use web 2.0 to build stronger ties with outside stakeholders. It is particularly relevant in our time-strapped, multi-tasking world where the public has grown weary or distrustful of traditional information sources.
As Theresa Howard recently reported in USA Today:
“The hot button for advertisers has become "engagement," or getting a customer to spend time, online or elsewhere, with a brand. The size of an audience is no longer the only ad measure that matters. Measures tracked for advertising online include downloads, e-mail pass-along rates (so-called viral campaigns), website registrations and product-information requests.”
With customer engagement, one-on-one interaction is not only feasible, it is desirable. The implications for PR 2.0 professionals are significant. Customer engagement will literally redefine success by providing new ways to measure results and track coverage.
And it is all made possible by the emergence of new media that is changing how we interact with the public and how the public interacts with us.
We have all experienced the pressure of measuring the results of our announcements. While our clients and bosses would love us to measure and predict results, we are not in the advertising world. It may sound to them like an excuse, but coverage is often predicated on unanticipated outside events. How do you quantify success when you intentionally kept your company out of a story? Which is a better measurement -- a brief mention in the Wall Street Journal or a cover story in a trade publication?
Now we need to factor in customer engagement. Which is a better indication of a success for your company -- a hit in the NY Times read by hundreds of thousands or a discussion on a popular blog read by hundreds or possibly thousands?
What if I said the reader skimmed the piece in the Times but engaged in a lengthy discussion with your product manager and fellow customers on the blog? Where is the customer more engaged? How do you determine which engagement is more meaningful? How do you communicate that result to your boss or client?
For me, I care about hits in mainstream media, but also mentions on blogs, downloads on iPods, and even business updates on mobile devices sent by local television affiliates.
In short, customer engagement changes the rules of the game and redefines the key metric we use to measure success: the impression report. With customer engagement, success is determined by which sources, the number of sources and the quality of the interaction that our customers, investors and partners have with those sources.
With new media we have a new way to build new relationships. With customer engagement, we have an opportunity to build new ways to measure the strength of those bonds.
Let me get back to you.
June is apparently the most popular time to get married. So in the remaining days of the month, it seems therefore appropriate to discuss one of the hottest topics in the advertising industy – customer engagement.
It is a term gaining currency here at EarthLink and at companies wishing to use web 2.0 to build stronger ties with outside stakeholders. It is particularly relevant in our time-strapped, multi-tasking world where the public has grown weary or distrustful of traditional information sources.
As Theresa Howard recently reported in USA Today:
“The hot button for advertisers has become "engagement," or getting a customer to spend time, online or elsewhere, with a brand. The size of an audience is no longer the only ad measure that matters. Measures tracked for advertising online include downloads, e-mail pass-along rates (so-called viral campaigns), website registrations and product-information requests.”
With customer engagement, one-on-one interaction is not only feasible, it is desirable. The implications for PR 2.0 professionals are significant. Customer engagement will literally redefine success by providing new ways to measure results and track coverage.
And it is all made possible by the emergence of new media that is changing how we interact with the public and how the public interacts with us.
We have all experienced the pressure of measuring the results of our announcements. While our clients and bosses would love us to measure and predict results, we are not in the advertising world. It may sound to them like an excuse, but coverage is often predicated on unanticipated outside events. How do you quantify success when you intentionally kept your company out of a story? Which is a better measurement -- a brief mention in the Wall Street Journal or a cover story in a trade publication?
Now we need to factor in customer engagement. Which is a better indication of a success for your company -- a hit in the NY Times read by hundreds of thousands or a discussion on a popular blog read by hundreds or possibly thousands?
What if I said the reader skimmed the piece in the Times but engaged in a lengthy discussion with your product manager and fellow customers on the blog? Where is the customer more engaged? How do you determine which engagement is more meaningful? How do you communicate that result to your boss or client?
For me, I care about hits in mainstream media, but also mentions on blogs, downloads on iPods, and even business updates on mobile devices sent by local television affiliates.
In short, customer engagement changes the rules of the game and redefines the key metric we use to measure success: the impression report. With customer engagement, success is determined by which sources, the number of sources and the quality of the interaction that our customers, investors and partners have with those sources.
With new media we have a new way to build new relationships. With customer engagement, we have an opportunity to build new ways to measure the strength of those bonds.
Let me get back to you.
Old media: A)a hit in the NYT is quite important. It gives you a picture, a stoped message. B) It is difficult to know how many people have read the article.
New media: A) a post is, or can be, a message in movement, wich means dialogue. B) Blog is a platform where you, exactly knows how many people are reading it.
Conclusions: 1)dialogue is richer than stoped messages and 2) blog control of visits post by post is much more precise than papers articles reading level at old media, metric wich does not exist.
Benito Castro (Seville) Spain, Europe. (Comment this)
For more information about Customer Engagement, such as
- what metrics the synthetic Customer Engagement metric can be broken down to
- what behaviours a customer's engagement with a brand leads to referral, loyalty etc), how these behaviours are linked with profitability and how they manifest themselves in a Web 2.0 market environment...
...check the Wikipedia entry on 'Customer Engagement' i have started. (Comment this)