WHAT IS ENGAGEMENT? When we think about engagement, we think about a potential audience member’s absorption in a message. Gail F. Goodman, for instance, describes engagement as a sort of practical analogue for brand loyalty, in her book Engagement Marketing: “Engagement Marketing refers to providing a great experience and encouraging your customers to tell your story through socially visible word-of-mouth referrals.” In other words, restaurants do better when they earn good reviews on Yelp!.

To the extent that engagement is thought of as a metric, then, it measures how invested a person is, no matter for how short a time, in the story we are trying to tell. If this sounds like a euphemism for a more direct term like “mindshare,” that is because engagement should be thought of less as a metric, and more as a type of marketing strategy.

It is probably over-harsh to say as Avinaush Kaushik does that “‘Engagment’ is not a metric, it’s an excuse” for low conversion rates on websites. However, engagement is much more productively thought of as something that is done, rather than something that is measured after the fact. Engagement is produced by outreach; to engage an audience member is to get them to invest in your story, and to have them come away from the engagement changed.

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT ENGAGEMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MEDIA?Lelan Harden and Bob Heyman, writing in their book Digital Engagement: Internet Marketing that Captures Customers, see social media as the ideal environment for fully engaging with your customer base: “[E]ngaging your customer within the online world requires a twist to the entire corporate mindset. It requires moving not just your media outreach but your entire organization’s mission into a participatory global economy that has no borders.” Because engagement is a two-way street, it makes perfect sense that the notion would appeal to new media marketers; social media and “web 2.0” projects have been presented from the start as decentralized and interactive.

But this old story about social media is in need of a refresh, and so is our understanding of how engagement fits into the social media picture. The story often told about social media is that it is a two-way communications medium, but it is better described as a popularity contest. Influence indices have been operative on the internet since PageRank and Technorati, but these were always somewhat blackboxed. But with new media like Twitter and Facebook

automatically and publicly branding you with a follower or fan count, and with Klout now counting up your various scores to determine who matters and who doesn’t, one must recognize that social media is just as much about using your bully pulpit, as listening to your customers.

For instance, social media is often presented as a means of keeping one’s finger on the pulse of the customer: “[C]ustomer service, customer care and solving problems quickly. By responding publicly to customer needs, … companies can demonstrate to their customers and prospects the level of care and attention they bring at key moments. This is also conversation and conversation that can build loyalists and community.” This only tells part of the story, though: if social media is to actually engage audience members with your brand, it has to function as more than a live-chat help desk.

Communicating in social media, then, requires large organizations to think like large organizations, and to leverage their brand to accumulate a targeted audience. Social media is like any other mass communications medium, in that large numbers of people are listening to a relatively small number of sources. Communicating with listeners requires a more personal touch, of course, but this is the very low price

one pays for having a dedicated, self-selected audience. And an open-eared, opted-in audience is the ideal audience for communicating any message … so long as you can keep your listeners engaged!

WHY IS THIS NEW UNDERSTANDING OF ENGAGEMENT IMPORTANT TO PUBLIC RELATIONS TODAY?We can no longer control when and where, and certainly not in what order, our messages are received. As a result, we must be able to produce potential user experiences that are effective on their own, but fit together snugly into a coherent overall message. Whether someone finds us first on Twitter, or on a press release site, or encounters our organization or initiative’s name in the traditional press and searches for more information on Google or even YouTube, we need to be ready to present them with a unified, but medium-specific and group-targeted message.

In this whitepaper, we will outline a 4-step process for producing engagements with your target audiences, in the social media environment.

Keeping these four steps clearly in mind during the necessarily complex planning stages of your social media strategy and the crafting of your message will allow you to produce engaging and modular user experiences.

Bob Feldman, in May 2012, addressed this necessity, of thinking about social media engagement as a part of any large-scale media strategy: “The most successful companies extend engagement beyond marketing and communications to sales, product development, and other functional areas in order to generate greater business impact.”

He provided an eye-opening example: “57% of socially engaged enterprises that receive a big [social media] return on investment crowdsource new products.” So long as your customers are talking and listening in a forum that’s becoming rapidly easier for large organizations to access in an effective manner, use this engagement white paper as a field guide to bending your potential listeners’ ears in an effective and medium-appropriate manner.

TELL A STORY THAT AROUSES THE READER’S INTERESTBecause social media is primarily delivered in shortened, bite-sized formats, like Facebook’s “status updates” and Twitter’s “tweets”, it can be easy to forget that humans always interact best when they are telling stories. For a major brand’s social media communications to be authentic, these must lead a reader along a path, and not simply drop a package in her lap. In other words, it is hard not to tweet a hard sell and a link sometimes, but that cannot be the heart of a Twitter campaign.

The recliner maker sees communication and branding both as immediately achievable goals, and so it wastes 11% of its available characters on irrelevant hashtags. Nike, on the other hand, tells its readers a story about athletic excellence and personal experience; it even has a voice, to the extent that anyone can hear an old coach in the first line. Even on social media, a campaign needs a structuring narrative in order to engage readers.

But if we don’t want to ruin a story by skipping immediately to the end, we also must have a story to tell in the first place; and this requires having something interesting to say. For instance, consider this release from the Hawaiian Telecom Union.

OFFER A SOLUTION TO THE QUESTION

YOU ASKED.

POSE A QUESTION THAT MUST BE

RESOLVED.

JUSTIFY YOUR SOLUTION, AND

INCLUDE A CALL-TO-ACTION.

TELL A STORY THAT AROUSES

THE AUDIENCE’S INTEREST.

This announcement’s prospective tone reassures both union members and other stakeholders of the company’s collective valuing of stability in the medium term. No negotiation is ever final, of course, and the sides may have to draw on their separate members’ goodwill in the future, but this announcement grows that goodwill by presenting both sides as honest dealers. This is a great, engaging story, and perfectly presentable for Twitter the news was quickly tweeted by several financial sites and local news sites, but without much help from the union or the company.

Once we have an engaging story, social media gives us many more channels in which to tell it, and many more opportunities to control it, by engaging our readers in the ongoing conversation that we create and manage.

POSE A QUESTION THAT MUST BE RESOLVED, THEN PROPOSE A SOLUTION.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the experimental psychologist who famously developed the notion of “flow,” believes that integrated body/mind happiness are only attainable when we are challenged at or just above our ability, that is, “when challenges and skills are relatively in balance, and above the individual’s mean level.” It is for this reason that posing problems to your readers is always one of the most effective ways to engage them; in posing a question to the reader, we put them in the middle of the action, to the extent that they feel they have a stake in seeing the question answered. In other words, because we all tend to be engrossed by appropriately difficult problems, posing your readers with such a problem keeps them more engaged, and for longer periods of time.

In social media, the posing of this problem can look very much like an offer. For instance, in 2007, the technology writer Brian Livingston, editor of Windows Secrets, wanted to publicize a big scoop on Windows Vista security: he had discovered a simple backdoor by which trial copies could be turned into full-license copies, without paying. In order to sell this story to the widest audience, he posed it as a problem, namely of how one goes about making this change.

Under embargo, Livingston sent the step-by-step instructions to other tech bloggers. When the story broke, a number of stories immediately went live with the instructions ready and verified, all linking back to Livingston’s site. Together, the coordinated, wide coverage and

backlinks drove not just direct traffic but search volume, by creating buzz on a story at whose center Livingston had placed himself.

And so while Livingston’s initial contact with the other bloggers was structured as a quid-pro-quo, the readers who encountered the story, on multiple sites, experienced it as a large event they could participate in, a problem they could solve, with Livingston as their guide.

Engagement is often used as a metric only related to cutting-edge, dynamic microsites or dedicated apps for handheld devices. But the basic problem any of these user interfaces has is to keep readers on the site from one moment to the next. And for this reason, one-way media such as text, images, and pre-recorded video can, if used properly, be just as engaging to a reader as an expensive, single-use site or app.

JUSTIFY YOUR SOLUTION, AND INCLUDE A CALL-TO-ACTION.You have told an interesting story, structured it around an important problem or question, and brought your reader to the appropriate solution. You have arrived at the hard-sell portion of the argument, which involves selling the idea you’ve just presented, and then actually selling something tangible; in other words, you have to justify your solution in specific terms, and present your audience with a specific course of action to take next.

This can seem like a lot to fit into, say, 140 characters, but describing the benefits of your solution can be often be achieved in one or two words with carefully-written copy. Consider GlobeNewswire’s use of Twitter to promote our new Newsroom site. In branding the Newsroom as a personalizable business news resource, we gave specific focus in each tweet to a specific feature that made the site more customizable:

RECEIVE CUSTOMIZED NEWS ON #INDUSTRIAL GOODS AND SERVICES #STOCKS AT #NASDAQ GLOBENEWSWIRE.

The argument, then, can be suggested in as little as an adjective; each of the benefits is presented as a keyword, sometimes for the reader, sometimes for Twitter’s search functions, and sometimes, of course, for both. Readers interested in finance and the featured industries will be more likely to find the appropriate tweets, and for that reason have a greater connection to them.

In social media, the most meaningful calls-to-action are links to external sites. Because social media marketing is always cross-

platform, the links you provide to your readers on Facebook and Twitter, and the links they share with one another, allow them to enter your conversation in a variety of ways. Every page and post, however small, should be thought of as a landing page, and should communicate the larger idea behind your project. Consider these two Microsoft Surface “status updates” on the product’s Facebook page.

Both direct their readers towards sales pages on the Microsoft Surface site (one to buy hardware, the other to buy software). The one on the left, however, manages to elicit more user participation by presenting itself both as an invitation to visit the external site and to participate and engage on Facebook itself, by answering the question. Social media engagement is not merely long-term relationship building; instead, it presents an opportunity to mix the hard sell with the soft sell, and relationship building with direct offers.

At some point, narrative relationship-building must translate into tangible action on the user’s part, and when users elect to “follow” or “friend” a company, they do so for very material reasons. As a 2009 RazorFish report found, social media followings develop not because of loyalty but because of immediate material interest: “Based on our research, it’s not so much about some type of ‘shared passion’ for a brand’s values. Largely, it’s about deals - pure and simple.” This doesn’t mean you have to become a coupon site, but only that a pointed call-to-action has no downside, so long as you have already done your job of engaging the user. People on social media want to be pitched ideas and brands, and doing so does not interfere with but rather extends engagement; don’t be shy about selling yourself!

CONCLUSION We have seen, above, that the question of engagement in the domain of social media is not a simple matter of how many “likes” you earn on Facebook, or the time users spend on your site. Engagement should instead be thought of as engagements - in other words, as actual encounters between the company and the potential consumer in a decentralized communications medium. Users will experience your message in quick snatches and glimpses, and you have to be able to capture their limited attention quickly, and present your brand as a worthwhile source of future information. You don’t just want visitors in social media, but “friends” and “followers” as well.

In order to engage potential and actual subscribers, we have to tell them compelling stories and involve them in the resolution of these by posing and offering solutions to questions they find meaningful in this context. Social media turns brands into mini news-outlets for the niche audience that cares about the particular product or service you offer, and so your news must be crafted such that this audience finds it relevant. And fortunately, this does not mean you have to abandon hard sells and direct appeals; indeed, action items such as the offer to read news announcements or download quarterly reports are a valuable kind of news for which your company should be the trusted authority. Social media does set a fairly high bar for building trust between brands and consumers, but it rewards brands that find their voice in this medium with the ability to speak directly to consumers on the questions that are of immediate concern to both parties.

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