Online engagement. What is it? Can you measure engagement online? Does online engagement exist in the real world? Or is it simply a subject du jour? What does it mean to say "A visitor is engaged?" WebAnalytics Demystified's Eric Peterson and I have been developing an formula for determining "online engagement". It's an interesting ride.
Everybody has an opinion and that's as far as I'm willing to comment on that. What I have little toleration for is people promoting their "engagement" metric without defining the term and providing definitive evidence that what they're measuring is what they've defined.
Gosh, I'm a finicky barstool, ain't I?
I keep on going back to something I wrote (long ago in internet time) in Starting the discussion: Attention, Engagement, Authority, Influence, ...:
- What do you mean when you use the words engagement, attention, and trust online?
- Can you repeatedly measure what you mean by them so that there's a reasonable surety that what you're measuring is what you mean by the terms you've used?
- Can you make these measurements through a commonly used web-enabled device?
This is a psycholinguist's perspective. Anything we have words for exists because we've created language to describe it. This is why we have beautiful pictures of things like angels and amoeba, unicorns and underwater life, ETs and electron microscopes. In other words, just because something can be named in cognitive reality doesn't mean it exists in physical reality.
In fact, things often don't exist in physical reality until we've created language for them.
And dear god, I do appreciate how much of a challenge the above statement can be to people, I truly do. I wrote about how common experience (hence language) can change reality in Expertise - Who Decides?
And bingo! I've given it away. Eric had come up with a formulation for "engagement". So had NextStage, several years back. I took a look at his formula and thought, "That's poop. That doesn't measure engagement."
One of the things I learned and strongly adhere to in business is something I learned while studying psychotherapy; Believe what the client tells you. They're putting lots of energy into it so honor them and believe they believe it. You don't have to believe it, you have to accept that they believe it.
Putting on those filters (I love changing my cognitive filters. Helps me understand things much better when I switch tool sets until I find one in which what's in front of me makes sense) I immediately recognized that Eric's formula makes complete sense in his frame of reference (traditional web analytics). His formula makes no sense in my frame of reference (cognitive science, etc).
My Eyes Open
Different frames of reference co-exist all the time. Ask any diplomat. Some of you may not know that diplomats -- whose tools are primarily language and information -- and mathematicians -- ditto -- have similar problem solving strategies.
Back up from Eric's definition. Back up from NextStage's definition. Back up from everyone's definitions. Determine commonalities, points of intersection, areas of overlap; is there a frame of reference in which all definitions are valid, a frame of reference in which any definition of "online engagement" is adds value to the solutions available (something mathematicians call a "solution space")?
Turns out there is. Mathematically it might not look simple and it is extremely simple. As I wrote in Continuing the discussion: Attention, Engagement, Authority, Influence and Measuring Online Engagement: Step One, the trick is to create a general frame of reference in which different definitions can both co-exist and are free to change as needs dictate.
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