I spent a few hours early this morning reading and re-reading someone's post on engagement. They put a lot of work into their argument. Unfortunately, there were some serious logic holes in their arguments that I truly doubt they were aware of or would even recognize as such. <ASIDE>
Let me go on the record at this point as stating that I'll accept anybody's definition of engagement as valid so long as the definition, the derivation of the definition and the method of proving the definition valid are internally consistent.
Basic law of world building, folks; You can have magic and violate the laws of physics if you want, just make sure that the laws that make magic work and the rules by which physics can be violated are self- and internally-consistent.
Not self- and internally-consistent? Sorry, the world -- or definition -- falls apart.
And while I'm <ASIDE>ing, I never thought NextStage's ability to correctly measure engagement or modify marketing material so that it would be more engaging as a big deal. Engagement was simply something we could do. In and of itself it doesn't matter much, it's just one metric among several, one lens among many.
What I do know is that the more lenses you can turn on something, the more tools (or metrics) you can apply to your study, the more information you have.
Also note that, like T.S. Eliot, I don't believe more information equates to more knowledge or that more knowledge equates to more wisdom.
</ASIDE>
While peering into these holes, however, I got to wondering about what they revealed. Logic holes normally occur when an individual or group makes assumptions -- uses what is often called common knowledge. The problem with common knowledge is that it's often what cultural psychologists sometimes call folk knowledge.
Folk knowledge is both wonderful and dangerous. Folk knowledge comes to us as folklore, folkremedies, folk-psychology, folktales and such. The wonderful element is that by studying folk anything we often discover the seeds of truth. This has great economic and medicinal value when we study folk remedies and learn that there are a few chemicals in that folk remedy's flower doing the job. By studying folktales and folk-psychology we learn how language changes over time, how beliefs form, how cultures rise and fall.Folk knowledge can also be dangerous because it is most often based on anecdotal information, hence anecdotal thinking. Anyone interested in the Cliff NotesTM version of this, read Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.
Do I have a vested interest in Engagement?
Of course I do. Any ideas -- folk or otherwise -- as to what it is?
Perhaps not so let me share my vested interest with you; I honest to god don't care if you use NextStage's definition of engagement in your work.
What I care about is that whatever definition you use it is sufficiently well defined that you and I can find a common ground for understanding each other's resulting metrics. This desire for mutual understanding is the basis for the work I've done with Eric Peterson re The Engagement Project.
So please understand. It's not that I want you to use my definition, it's that I want to know what your definition is exactly when you point at it.
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