The Engagement Principles

When I posted about Bravo TV’s engagement-rich Web site, my request for an interview went unanswered, so a few questions went unanswered.

Fortunately, some of my questions were answered in a DM News interview with Bravo’s Lisa Hsia - Senior VP of new media, Bravo.

It was a short interview (and worth a couple minutes of your time). Two key questions revolved around emerging technology and the value Bravo TV places on engagement:

Q: What strategy does Bravo take with emerging technology?

A: The way I look at it, we’re not only an entertainment company, we’re in the engagement business. We’re increasingly having success monetizing engagement. For the Project Runway mobile fan club, we had 92% participation while normal engagement is 1%–2%. We also did vot­ing with cable remotes [for Top Chef] with Time Warner and Dish Network. With Time Warner, we had 26% participation. In the beginning it was just an experi­ment. Now, sponsors come on board because they want the engagement our users have.

Q: How does this engagement add value for advertisers?

A: With Bravo’s Info Frame [an interactive panel allowing viewers to participate in polls, games and chats during programming], the consumer is interacting during the program as well as during the commercials themselves. The advertisers can also interact and, presumably, if they’re engaging during the program, they’re going to engage during advertisements.

The numbers repeated in the first answer would make any marketing exec (or ad salesman) sit up a little straighter.

Yet the second answer (How does this engagement add value for advertisers?) is conspicuous mostly for its lack of numbers.

At this point, engagement is hard to quantify, which is why so many organizations are standing on the sidelines.

While I had criticisms of Bravo TV’s site (it’s confusing and hard to navigate), you have to applaud them for taking risks - and enjoying the payoffs.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler

bravo, bravo tv, engagement, engagement marketing, dmnews

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In a Chief Marketer Column, Grant Johnson examines the state of email marketing in light of today’s increasingly overstuffed inbox.

He cites the battles marketers face in their attempts to achieve and sustain high email opening rates (online marketers keep hoping RSS syndication and other media channels will solve this problem), and offers one solution in this passage:

The obvious take-away is that the subject line is probably the most important part of your e-mail and deserves quite a bit of attention.

The not so obvious take-away is that increasing trust is central to increasing open and conversion rates. That means your copy is the key to gaining and keeping a high level of confidence from your recipients. What length works best?

Johnson writes with a great deal of knowledge, though his “obvious” take-away isn’t so much obvious as it is traditional. Yes, headline length is critical, but fudging with copy length - while important - also has the taste of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

eMail volume is not about to start slacking off, and frankly, a lot of the low-hanging testing fruit has already been plucked.

Instead of mucking about with headlines for marginal increases in open rates, why not engage readers to the point where they’re eagerly anticipating your next email?

In other words, maybe it’s time marketers worried a little less about the immediate results of their efforts, focusing instead on the long-term benefits of tactics like engagement marketing.

This has the added benefit of offering customers a retained image (previous high quality content) beyond the email subject line; if customers and prospects were engaged with high-quality content on previous communications, then the “from” line on the email promises more to the reader than almost any headline could.

We all receive emails from entities which are opened immediately - almost regardless of headline. We’re highly engaged readers, and email marketers looking to dramatically boost open rates should look for ways to tap into that level of customer response.

Engagement Marketing for Email

Admittedly, engaging with customers and prospects via shared passions and values is a hard sell to metrics-crazy online marketers.

Fuzzy, harder-to-define engagement metrics are still in their infancy, and aggressive online marketers have grown fond of driving a stake through the heart of any program not generating immediate results.

Still, the long-term perspective shouldn’t be ignored - especially once the lifetime value of customers becomes a part of the conversation.

Let me be clear; I’m not advocating an end to testing. It’s valuable information, and often acquired at very reasonable cost. And engagement marketing simply doesn’t apply to some markets or products.

Still, it’s time marketers looked beyond adding or subtracting 12 characters from their email headlines in an attempt to boost open rates.

Instead, engaging with customers (whenever possible) promises to deliver open rate increases far beyond the fractional - and often transient - increases offered by simple testing methods.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.

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This little gem from American Copywriter caught my eye; it relates how a hit TV show is using tweets - ostensibly sent by the show’s characters - to engage the viewing audience:

In addition, each profile links to the official AMC site, and there does seem to be some highly subtle show promotion. For instance, last Sunday morning, well before the episode aired, @don_draper tweeted: “Wishing I didn’t have to spend most of my Sunday at the office.” It was later revealed in the show, of course, that Draper had to head into the city to work on the American Airlines pitch. Nice.

I often say engagement marketing is about connecting with the shared values and passions of an audience. Nowhere is it written those doing the connecting have to be real, and this is a shining example.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.

Prior to the launch of its new “Digital Nomads” site, Dell Computers had only dipped their toe in the engagement marketing waters with the Dell blog.

Apparently, they liked what they saw, because Digital Nomads is a veritable showcase of social network channels, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, an online community, and even a crowd-sourced whitepaper defining “digital nomad.”

Launched alongside the release of several new Dell laptops, Digital Nomads is a deliberate attempt to update Dell’s sometimes-stodgy image among younger, digitally enabled users.

This from the initial post on the site’s blog:

We’re all becoming digital nomads. And nomads want to know how to use
their technology in the most productive way every day. So, we decided
to create a site dedicated to Digital Nomads — a community where you
can network with others, learn and share ideas, and hear from some of
the best who are doing exactly what you do.

While I don’t have budget figures for the site, an interesting aspect of social media-driven sites like DigitalNomads is that most of the channels used to engage with customers are free, and the expenses accrue in the “seed content” expense column (an expense not listed in most marketing organizaton’s budget)

I’ll make a point of monitoring Dell’s interesting new Digital Nomads site.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.

I tell my clients they should participate in online conversations about their brand, yet how do you participate in an online conversation when you don’t know it even exists?

Google Alerts, Technorati and other services track blog/news/Web mentions of your brand, but what about message boards and forums?

Forums and message boards can be volatile, unpredictable places - and they’re very time consuming to
track.

twing is a search engine for forums and message boards - an invaluable tool for businesses

How do you track your brand across the message board universe without investing truly epic amounts of time?

Try Twing. It’s Free. It’s Effective. It’s Our Friend.

Twing - a free search service aimed squarely at forums and message boards - offers you the ability to search forums and message boards for mentions of your brand - a significant time saver for those tracking brands online.

While not specifically designed for business usesrs, twing does allow you to run simple searches (similar to Google), and even save complex searches.

You can also search by posts, topic or forum, and add key forums to your “favorites” list.

I entered the name of my fly fishing blog, and found several discussions on forums I didn’t know existed. All the mentions were positive, but the question remains: Who’s saying what about your business?

Try twing, and maybe you’ll find out.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.

The Communities Dominate Brands blog has long been a favorite. As pioneers in the engagement marketing movement, they “get it” in a way that few others have - though their ideas weren’t always embraced.

That’s changing.

Alan Moore’s latest post chronicles the rising chorus of names who see the writing on the wall. Interruption’s not dead, but engagement is rising fast.

None other than Ogilvy (the agency) now thinks engagement is becoming an imperative instead of just another buzzword:

Ogilvy it seems have become Messianic to the SMLXL philosophy

To influence the engaged consumers of the digital democracy, push marketing needs to be replaced by engagement marketing

Said Patou Nuytemans - who I do know. So nice one Patou - thanks for spreading the word.

An aside I would like to make is that, the emphasis on pure digital
is a little cul-de-sac of straight line logic (Not Patou’s fault - I
can assure you) because we live not separate from offline and online -
we live in a world of blended reality.

That last paragraph is important. My career began just as typewriters were being replaced by computers, and my background remains heavily rooted in “traditional” B2B media (advertising, direct response).

Yet I’m still fully capable of ignoring existing media channels in favor of interactive digital media - an error in perspective shared by many of my marketing colleagues.

If Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen look to be reveling in the growing acceptance of engagement marketing as a viable partner to traditional marketing techniques, then they’re entitled.

From their blog:

All Companies must learn to move from interruption to
inviting participation. For all marketing initiatives, this no longer
means communicating by interruption, but by engagement

Is what was written in CDB, waaaaaaay back in 2005 and in fact it was something I spoke a great deal about in 2002.

What we got back from the media, clients, - well you name them, was
something along the lines of a nervous twitch or a blank stare - or
some clever dickie leaning over the table and telling me his compliment
was a “double-edged” sword because I was a pioneer and they tended to
get shot.

As Moore notes, he’s still alive and kicking.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.

Corporations are struggling with business blogs - at least according to a recent Forrester Research report mentioned by Ken Magill in his Direct Magazine article:

Business-to-business blogging took a nosedive this year, mainly because returns on corporate blogs haven’t matched investment, according to a recent report by Forrester Research.

However, analyst Laura Ramos, the lead author of the report, recommends businesses take a second look at corporate blogs.

“Rather than cross blogging off the marketing communications list, marketers would do better to embrace one of the four strategies prominently used by bloggers to attract readers, build conversations, and engage community members in sharing their experiences with their online peers,” said Ramos’s report, “How to Derive Value From B2B Blogging.”

Still, the number of new corporate blogs has dropped sharply in the last year and a half, according to the report, with 36 companies launching them in 2006, 19 in 2007, and just three in the first quarter of 2008, according to Forrester.

In my online marketing classes, I tell small business clients that engagement marketing is the great leveler; big businesses don’t engage well, but that small businesses do.

That’s a function of several elements, but in simplest terms, small business are often more “real” with customers. Corporations? They fall victim to their inability to escape boring, meaningless “corporatespeak.”

Indeed, Forester’s report speaks to the traits required to successfully engage customers:

Successful corporate blogs “talk openly with an authentic voice,” and are “humble and honest,” two traits that run counter to many corporate egos, said Forrester’s report.

Ouch.

Too many corporations see blogs as merely another pipeline into which they shovel PR materials, or worse - as Web-based showcases for preening executives.

The ugly truth is this: customers and prospects want useful information or thought leadership. While both are available inside your average corporation, the fear of transparency is a barrier most corporations won’t overcome.

Another trap lies hidden within the language itself; many potential contributors to corporate blogs aren’t very good writers, a fact which suggests the need for an editor.

Some organizations have shown excellent returns from blogging (like Patagonia’s Cleanest Line), and the benefits of engaging with customers (binding them to the brand via shared passions and values) are significant - and will grow more so as marketing costs rise.

The fact that growth in business blogs is slowing should provide additional fuel to those who are getting it right.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.

I’ve viewed the rampant hype — and sky-high valuations — of social networking sites with more than a few questions. In a hyper-connected landscape, how scalable are social networks?

Or more simply, how many networks can one belong to - or how many connections can someone make - before the quality of their interactions falls below the level at which they’ll bother to maintain them? (Hint: I keep seeing the number 150 bandied about, including in the top comment of this Nicholas Carr post)

A recent report suggests social network growth is plateauing, and the copycat social network sites are starting to shutter their doors:

Social Networking Gets a Sanity Check - GigaOM

After years of hype, noise and funding, the social networking sector is finally getting a harsh, but necessary, sanity check.

Today there are numbers out from comScore that indicate plateauing growth for the big two — MySpace and Facebook — in the U.S. Last week, Revision3 canceled “SocialBrew,” an online video show dedicated to social networking. Meanwhile, Monster killed its Tickle social networking service (first reported in April by TechCrunch), following closely on the heels of CondeNast’s shuttering of Flip and Verizon’s decision to close up its virtually unknown network, which had managed to garner a mere 18,000 members. (Verizon has shifted its community to Facebook.)

Of course, plateauing growth isn’t the same as impending doom, though the combination of slowing growth and ongoing difficulties with monetization raise some troubling issues.

The larger question is really this; will the biggest social networks fall under their own weight, only to be replaced by smaller, self-segregating social networks? Will they simply be high-tech versions of the same old message boards, groups and forums that have existed largely since the Internet’s inception?

It’s possible (if not downright likely) we’ll see more targeted groups emerge from the hysteric fog of today’s social networking frenzy. In the meantime, organizations looking to engage with consumers and prospects will best do so by creating their own content, and using that to prime the “user-generated” content pump.

Relying solely on “connections” to engage readers represents wishful thinking taken to an unlikely extreme.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.

Technorati Tags: social networking, social networks, facebook, myspace, engagement marketing

I teach online marketing workshops for entrepreneurs, and a recurring mantra of mine is that “small businesses can easily out-compete big business on the Internet,” especially in the engagement marketing arena.

It’s meant to offer a ray of hope for the micro-entrepreneurs — who often feel defeated in their marketing before they even start – but it also happens to be true.

In my Engagement Principles executive white paper (I’d call it a manifesto, but that frightens people), I not-so-bravely suggest that authenticity trumps hype and corporatespeak every time.

And in markets where entrepreneurs — even micro entrepreneurs — bring a passion for their market or product to the table, they’ve got a leg up on those who don’t, a category which typically includes their larger (sometimes much larger) competitors.

They also have the ability to “Market Bravely” - a view espoused by Arthur Ceria in this Chief Marketer article:

Corporate bureaucracy drains the life out of marketing campaigns. By the time everyone at the table has had their say, an innovative idea is generally transformed into yet another iteration of the same old safe thing. Then everyone wonders why their “new” blog/widget/forum/flash demo flopped and resolves never to do anything that inventive again.

Rather than dissect each new idea to death, adopt a start-up mentality when launching a new product or service. Since you’re basically starting from scratch, capitalize on this fresh slate.

Startups aren’t afraid to be innovative. Their mentality is all about risk taking, customer engagement and honestly. One can go after the competition full speed ahead without abandoning logic or taking undue risks. Rather than burn money on trial balloons like big companies, a must startup rely on deep knowledge of—and consistent interaction with—their market to decide what risks make sense.

Big companies can (and are) enjoying the benefits of engagement marketing, but then again, so are small companies.

Engaging with consumers and prospects around shared passions and values doesn’t exclude larger companies from playing, but it does often tip the scales towards smaller, more aggressive organizations — especially those willing to risk transparency and authenticity while banning corporatespeak.

Stay engaged, Tom Chandler.

Are advertising agencies playing an active role in the slow demise of television?

Dan Stein suggests that — in our user-focused, content-driven, Web 2.0 media age — Madison Avenue has it so wrong, that viewers are abandoning television because of the advertising and not the programs.

The ad agency industry needs to wake up to the fact that “the new media” are not going to save them from obsolescence; in fact, the new media options give people even more control over the ad exposure experience. More importantly, television in its broadcast and network forms remains the most effective marketing communications medium yet devised and since it is the driver of content for virtually all platforms will be around for many years to come.Perhaps the ultimate result of integrating ads into programs will be that the ad creation process will be taken over by people who understand what viewers want: the networks and their production companies. Something has to replace the damage being caused to TV by the destructive dinosaurs we call ad agencies.

It’s an interesting premise, though one that ignores an essential reality; broadcast television isn’t particularly interactive, and neither is it on-demand.

Viewers are drifting away from television not simply because of the advertising (though big ad agencies haven’t yet grasped the importance of engagement over interruption). They’re disappearing because television isn’t user-driven, and new media are.

It’s easier to engage, and one thing we’ve learned is that consumers are anxious to engage with brands, not be manipulated by them.