Thoughts regarding Metrics for the Engagement Marketing

Note: Though this is mainly a German blog I am posting this in English because the sources of my thoughts derive from several English blog postings – and in order to stir up a discussion on this I’d like to choose the right means of understanding.

In preparation of the panel about “Community Controlling” at the upcoming “Community SUMMIT” on Wednesday I ran along an interesting post of Peter Kim discussing a framework of measuring social media. This led me to some Google research and brought me to a posting of Jeff Quipp Ruud Hein back in November last year – defining the participation approach as the “flipside of the Attention Economy” – discussed by Michael H. Goldhaber. If we take participation as expressed engagement – then “Engagement Marketing” (see also Wikipedia) is the strategy towards a “share of mind” within the attention economy.

Concluding on the thoughts of Peter Kim – my feelings are that attention and participation are not the right measures as the first is the general outcome of the second which is the key of the overall strategy. IMHO the measures must defined in between at the levers of reaching attention throughout participation.

So I thought a little about what other factors besides “influence” and “authority” exist to gain attention. As I am a strong believer in the Social Presence theory “immersion” is IMHO another good measure for the reached engagement. Mediated social groups (as definition for communities) need some kind of emotional glue (as the German sociologist Thiedeke says) – immersion is a measure of explains the emotional feelings within a mediated world.

Another measure I would like to add to this is the activation for the “context” – means for the product, the political or sociological key matter of the community action. Especially in the case of “engagement marketing” the efforts of engaging customers/readers/users is not without objectives – and not without a consumption context. So in order to determine the business relevance of the engagement the activation for the “context” is needed.

This brings me to a framework that can be visualized as the following:

Whereas the leveraging factors can be defined and operationalized as follows:

• Authority – as the measure for the relevance of “my voice”
  • inbound links to your content – like trackbacks and inbound links to a blog post or sites linking to a YouTube video (Peter Kim).
• Activation – as the measure for the importance of the subject/matter/cause for the engagement
  • contextual relevance of the user’s action/postings/conversations as mentioned by Jeremiah Owyang
• Immersion – as the measure for the emotional traction of the engagement
  • sentiment as mentioned by Peter Kim and Jeremiah Owyang
• Influence – as the measure for the reach within a social structure
  • size of the user base subscribed to your content.  For blogs, feed or email subscribers; followers on Twitter or Friendfeed; or fans of your Facebook page (Peter Kim)

So these are my thoughts so far – what do you think about this?