A recent posting titled “What is Engagement and How do We Measure It” by Social Media Explorer, Jason Falls got me thinking. In his posting, he quotes several sources who formulate engagement based on a wide assortment of trackable factors. In fact, he quotes Lee Odden who says:

“Linking, bookmarking, blogging, referring, clicking, friending, connecting, subscribing, submitting inquiry forms and buying are all engagement measures at various points in the customer relationship.”

This is quite a melange of statistics. A person can easily get lost tracking the daily gyrations of a loosely associated string of digits. But, what do all these numbers really mean? Jason then points out that each of the luminaries’ definitions are, to one degree or another, couched in the phrase, “it depends.” I think Jason has uncovered one of the great fallacies of social media measurement.

I think the response, “it depends”, should be the equivalent of a blaring alarm bell to anyone in the C-Suite. It’s a sky-splitting shriek that declares that the marketing team is tracking tactical performance rather than strategic success. That phrase should send shivers up and down the length of any decision-makers’ vertebrae. To me, it signifies that marketing is playing mix and match with metrics, depending on the tactics deployed.

Email Campaign – A launched yielding an open rate of 17% and a click-thru-rate of 6%. And if they’re really on the ball – web traffic increased by 2.3%, average pages visited increased by 1.9 and average time on site increased by 46 seconds during the campaigns run.

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Those seem like a decent set of numbers that could possibly illustrate “engagement”. But, the “engagement” from this email campaign is illustrated only in metrics directly effected by that campaign. What effect has this email campaign had on your on-going SEO and other channel efforts? To what degree has it effected the participation in your web site and social networks? If these questions can’t be answered, than you aren’t measuring the only type of “engagement” that matters.

Here at SOCIALtality, we define engagement as a company’s ability to attract and retain customers. That’s really the only type of engagement that has strategic relevance — isn’t it? And you can’t measure that based on a mix and match system of metrics relevant to particular tactics.

In order to properly quantify your ability to attract and retain customers or true engagement, you’ve got to measure all of the inbound and outbound attributes for each of your communications channels on a consistent, on-going basis — despite whatever tactic-of-the-month recently launched.

Jason’s post was fantastic both for it’s intended and perhaps, unintended meaning. If quantifying “engagement” depends . . . than you’re really just measuring the result of an audience or initiative-based conglomeration of tactics.

Engagement cannot be quantified in terms of visits or comments or friends or fans or by any select combination of those metrics. True engagement, strategic engagement, engagement the way SOCIALtality views it, is actually measured by taking all of those things and many many more into account and then quantifying the correlation between individual metrics across the entire communication channel spectrum.

What do you think of this approach?

Tags: marketing channel, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Measurement, Social Media ROI

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 4:46 PM by MattC and is filed under Social Media ROI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.