Customer Engagement: Is the brand engaging back?
Listening and engagement. Very common terms in the ‘sociosphere’. We may have gotten listening right for the most part but engagement still has a ways to go. Unlike listening, real engagement seems to mean different things to different people making measurement all that more difficult. And probably futile. I do stand to be corrected on that though.
For some brands, engagement happens when their tweets get re-tweeted. For others it happens when people post on their Facebook wall. I like Jeremiah Owyang’s definition of engagement, it makes it easier to demystify this animal. However, I feel there’s a missing component. But first, @jowyang’s definition from his blog article about three years ago.
We seem to agree that engagement happens when visitors show some interest in the content. I think that’s a great place to start. But what happens after they show their interest? Not all of the interest visitors indicate requires some response from the brand but it is increasingly common for brands to [apparently] ignore direct requests for support/service. Take for instance Esteban Kolksy (@ekolsky). AT&T apparently was not treating him right. He tweeted his dissatisfaction at around 3am UTC on 21st Aug, 2010 and from what I have seen as of 1900hrs UTC on the 22nd, they hadn’t responded.
Because engagement connotes some kind of conversation and relationship, factoring the other side of the engagement is necessary in order to determine how well the brand is doing in the social spaces it’s present. If the content strategy is spot on, and the public is commenting, linking, tweeting and retweeting it, we can assume some engagement is going on. If some of that engagement involves questions, suggestions or opinions which the brand ignores, the level of engagement will be difficult to sustain. Even with new content. Why? Because humans don’t do very well in conversations with inanimate objects. A brand that doesn’t respond to engagement by engaging back is inanimate. Speaking back gives the brand humanity. Life.
So how does this affect social CRM? A successful implementation of CRM involves people, data, culture, process and technology handled right. People and culture are the biggest parts of the mix. If the culture the internal people have isn’t very social, adoption of social CRM is doomed to fail. An inanimate brand in the ‘sociosphere’ is a sign of an organization with a poor social culture internally.
Would love to hear your opinion. Jump in anytime and interrupt my rantings…
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