Social Media: It's About Engagement, Not Page Views
“I use the word engagement as the new metric, as opposed to viewing.”
Albie Hecht, CEO of Worldwide Biggies Company, a digital entertainment studio that creates content for young adults (think Naked Brothers Band on Nickelodeon), is quoted as saying the above in the new book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, by Ken Auletta.
For months now I’ve been struggling with social media. No, not how to use it or how to derive value from it but how to measure it.
Simply gunning for more followers or page views or click-throughs wasn’t cutting it for me as this type of measurement is based on the old rules of passive viewing of traditional media (reading print ads, watching TV, listening to the radio).
I’ve been asking myself, “how do I measure the value of social media and how do I show this value to my clients dynamically as opposed to presenting meaningless numbers in flat reports?”
I mean, really, just what does “one thousand Twitter followers” mean to anyone and are these 1,000 followers any better than 100 followers?
Some days it seems that social media, with its emphasis on numbers of followers and friends and RTs and page views, is just high school all over again.
Hecht, however, nails it. In the same conversation in which he’s quoted, he talks about the Web as a platform where people can tell their own stories. He goes on to say:
If we can move someone so they love this character, and they’re moved through a story, and they’re playing a game, and they’re collecting objects in that, and at the end of this experience they have created their own video of this experience, we’ll have moved them into a different type of storytelling.
Brilliant.
Throughout the Googled book, the point is hammered home repeatedly that we, the people, are now in control of the story. As David Meerman Scott has repeatedly said, companies no longer control their stories (i.e. messages), we the people are doing for them via social media.
What does this mean for marketers?
It means that instead of coming up with new stories and devising campaigns around them, marketers (myself included) need to figure out how to compel people to interact with our companies / products / services and then tell their stories about this interaction.
Waters Corporation figured this out with their Customer Testimonial video campaign, to name just one example.
Engagement versus page views is a new way of thinking about marketing, one that requires a complete mind shift. But I really believe that if you want to bring value to your clients or your company, it’s a shift you have to make — like now.
Do you agree or disagree?
November 18th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Well said Dianna.
November 18th, 2009 at 9:05 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by David Meerman Scott, Dianna Huff. Dianna Huff said: New blog post: Social Media is All About Engagement, Not Page Views. http://bit.ly/rqamM [...]
November 18th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Dianna,
I have to completely agree with you here. This engagement is the central pillar that makes these media channels truly work, and this is how, in my estimation that we will begin to separate ourselves from the people who “USE social media” and who “UNDERSTAND Social Media”. It all goes back to the age old digression of quantity vs. quality. In my eyes engagement represents QUALITY interaction while page views is just a flimsy measurement of QUANTITY. Well done, nice post. Great information. Keep it coming!
November 18th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Social comments and analytics for this post…
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November 18th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Matthew,
Thank you — I agree completely about “quantity” versus “quality.” Thank you for stopping by!
November 18th, 2009 at 11:57 am
I fully agree, but at the end, how can you measure engagement?
November 18th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Jorge,
That is a good question. I would say you should measure engagement based on what actions or engagements are important to you and your business.
Actually, here is a good case for engagement — the Chocolate Grasshoppers campaign:
http://marcom-writer-blog.com/2009/07/28/chocolate-grasshopper-campaign-by-the-numbers/
They wanted to create buzz — and while the numbers focus on page views, they also got a ton of engagement in the form of 170 bloggers writing about them.
November 18th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
HI Dianna,
Thanks for the shout out with our Chocolate Covered Grasshopper Campaign. And Jorge, I hope this example is helpful to you. Our goal of this campaign was not sales, but to create a Buzz and an awareness around our new brand “Grasshopper”, a brand FOR entrepreneurs.
To give a more specific example, we created a video that was attached to this campaign and went viral called “Entrepreneurs Can Change the World”. You can see it http://grasshopper.com/idea or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6MhAwQ64c0 .
Now, what I am proud of is not that this was viewed 277,000 times. What makes me feel good, and what makes us feel like this was a success is the response we got from entrepreneurs. The amount of e-mails and phone calls we got saying that this video MOVED them. When i would e-mail it to someone and they would tell me that 4 other people in their office already sent it to them, and they saw it at a conference they were at last week. That is engagement. That is reigniting peoples pride in entrepreneurship. Engagement is 270+ people who felt compelled enough to take the time to comment on our video. Comments that expressed peoples ability to relate to our message and the emotions this brought out in them.
That is engagement. And to us, that is success.
Hopefully more to come on this. Great topic, thanks Dianna,
Jonathan Kay @grasshopperbuzz
November 18th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
You had me with … “I mean, really, just what does ‘one thousand Twitter followers’ mean to anyone and are these 1,000 followers any better than 100 followers?”
This has always been my biggest pet peeve with people using Twitter who constantly tweet about getting tons of followers. What’s the point of this? What does it matter how many followers you have if none of them are communicating with you in any meaningful way?
I recently went through my list of followers and started “unfollowing” those who never interact with me. I am going to do this on a regular basis from now on, because I’m not following people simply to hear them tweet about themselves, but to have them interact with me beyond 140 characters. I make it a point to visit their sites and leave comments where I’m intrigued and RT their tweets that I find interesting. If these people can’t reciprocate then I don’t need to be following them.
That’s my policy from now on, because it’s like you said – It’s About Engagement, Not Page Views.
November 18th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
@ Jonathan — Thank you so much for your input! And for the record, I have watched your video I don’t know how many times because it does inspire me — and still brings tears to my eyes. I think it’s wonderful that you inspired so many others as well.
@ Doug — I am implementing the same policy. I’m trying to pay more attention to the people I do follow and connect with them beyond Twitter. It’s a lot of work, so if you’re following thousands of people, you don’t have the meaningful relationships because at some point, you run out of time.
November 18th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
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November 18th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Here’s another part of my strategy – if I make a comment on a person’s site and they don’t post it then I stop following them immediately. I keep a bookmark folder of all the pages I comment on and I check it regularly. Is this nuts? Not really. It’s called networking. I only want to be associated with those who regularly associate with me. I then wait to see if that person will take the time to visit my own site and leave any comments there. It doesn’t always happen, of course, but I am impressed when someone does this on their own (without having to be told) and therefore that type of person is definitely worth following.
November 18th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Great point, Dianna, and I think Jorge hits the nail on the head for most marketers pursuing social media – the potential of social media to boost engagement is compelling and conceptually clear but actually measuring engagement and linking it to important business outcomes is exceedingly difficult (particularly for larger businesses).
This is what we’re finding as we analyze the results from our recent business social media benchmarking study. There’s an interesting chart on pg. 18 of the top-level report (available at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study) that’s relevant to this discussion. We asked those currently involved with social media initiatives at their companies to indicate how well they can see the impact of these initiatives on their social media success metrics (which they provided in an earlier question). While ‘engagement with prospects’ was the 2nd most used social media success metric, used by 57% of the 1,647 respondents to this question, less than half (43%) of those using ‘engagement with prospects’ reported that data about the impact of their social media initiatives on this metric was either part of standard reports or easily accessible.
In other words, 57% of respondents working for companies where ‘engagement with prospects’ is a key social media success metric have basically no ability to measure this metric. While we didn’t put this in the top-level report, the situation is actually worst for the larger companies in the study. We’ll get into that more when we release the small business version of the report in a few weeks.
And, to the extent any readers see the use of the Albie Hecht example as indicating that prospect and customer engagement may be more relevant and more utilized in the B2C world, I can assure them this is not the case. In the B2B version of our social media benchmarking research (http://www.business.com/info/b2b-social-media-benchmark-study) we show on pg. 36 that there is no statistically significant difference between B2B and B2C companies in the use of this metric.
Again, great perspective Dianna (and everyone else on this thread). If there are more great examples of how to effectively measure engagement, our fellow marketers definitely need them.
November 18th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
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November 18th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Hi Dianna!
Thank you so much for the shout out on our Waters customer testimonial campaign. We are honored when you mention our work and figure that we must be doing something right if you think so! Thanks again!
Clare
November 18th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
@ Ben — Thank you for posting your feedback with regard to your survey. I have downloaded it and will definitely read it. I was just talking with a client yesterday and venting my frustration that I am awash in data but can’t tell you how all of this *stuff* impacts the bottom line with any type of meaningful analysis.
@ Clare — How nice to see you! And thank you again for letting me feature your video campaign.
November 19th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
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November 20th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Dear Diane
Your post is so true… nice going. Somebody else who sees more than just numbers.
This is why we focus on impact, engagement and conversation:
http://howto.commetrics.com/influence/involvement/
So we feel if one blogs these things must be addressed as well. I invite you Diane and all of your readers to just register yourself:
http://My.comMetrics.com
Start benchmarking your blog and watch the trend including the level of engagement you are accomplishing.
Thanks again for this really nice post.
Regards
Urs
@ComMetrics will have to tweet this right now – I will.
November 22nd, 2009 at 1:52 pm
[...] @dkasrel @michelelinn Social Media: It’s about engagement, not pageviews @diannahuff [...]
November 22nd, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Yes it is all about engaging. Twitter engaging is like the dating relationships. I even made a blog post about dating principles and social media. It is about creating interaction and curiousity and giving publicity to your guests instead of yourself. It is part of top notch PR work.
I agree with David Scott about companies cannot control their stories and that customers share via social media. Social media is like a big market full of good and bad vendors. It is up to us to choose which vendor we become and how our customers react to us…
Thank you Dianne
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Urs — Thank you.
Tatyana — It is all about “top notch PR work.”
Thank you both for stopping by and leaving comments.
December 16th, 2009 at 4:16 am
1. Often we forget the little guy, the SMB, in our discussions of the comings and goings of the Internet marketing industry. Sure there are times like this when a report surfaces talking about their issues and concerns but, for the most part, we like to talk about big brands and how they do the Internet marketing thing well or not so well.
http://www.onlineuniversalwork.com