Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

Engage­ment is a term that has been used so much in the last cou­ple years by mar­keters it’s start­ing to loose it’s mean­ing. It’s become a short­hand for do some­thing “social.”

But engage­ment at it’s best is an emo­tional involve­ment or com­mit­ment between two par­ties. Unfor­tu­nately, com­mit­ment is some­thing many mar­keters only expect of their cus­tomers, not them­selves. They’re only com­mit­ted to push­ing the mes­sage out there and not lis­ten­ing to what the other per­son has to say. For­tu­nately for mar­keters cus­tomers are used to being treated this way. That’s how I feel every time I deal with the phone com­pany or a credit card company.

So why are these com­pa­nies get­ting into social media in the first place? Many see it as cheap media. But many are well mean­ing, want real inter­ac­tion but sim­ply don’t under­stand the time com­mit­ment asso­ci­ated with a true two-way con­ver­sa­tion. And they also don’t see (or can’t advo­cate up the chain) the cus­tomer ser­vice, sales, or PR value yet.

So if you want real engage­ment, I sug­gest you not take “baby steps” but take mea­sured steps into social media and not leaps. Leaps can lead to instant scal­a­bil­ity prob­lems and cause con­fu­sion mar­keters. Frankly, the peo­ple who work in mar­ket­ing and PR are not used to talk­ing to cus­tomers on a one-to-one scale. So what do you do?

Step one: Listen.

Step two: Develop a plan for engage­ment based on goals and what you’ve heard.

Step three: Cre­ate a pres­ence where your largest group of cus­tomers can reach you the eas­ily (fish where the fish are). And start a conversation.

Con­cen­trate on this third step for a month or so before launch­ing a Twit­ter pres­ence, a Friend Feed, a Youtube Chan­nel and so on.

We find that this is plenty for most com­pa­nies at first. Even if you are just launch­ing a Face­book fan page, you can gen­er­ate sig­nif­i­cant traf­fic to your cor­po­rate site and learn a lot about engag­ing your cus­tomers quickly. This is a lot bet­ter sit­u­a­tion than start­ing a social media “exper­i­ment” with an instant scal­a­bil­ity prob­lem. From here it will be eas­ier to tran­si­tion to real engage­ment with cus­tomers rather than falling back into the same old push men­tal­ity we all used to be so com­fort­able with.