On Engagement

The most insightful comment I’ve heard about engagement came from a friend of mine who recently got engaged. My friends and I were pushing her to assign quantified values to the various features of her fiancée. How would you rate his looks? His job? His family? His personality? His taste in television? We were probing and searching for some empirical justification for why she had accepted his marriage proposal.

She basically set us straight. She said it was about how connected she felt to him, not about any quantifiable components. I reflected on this for a minute, then I realized she was damn right.

There are more than a few consultants and interactive marketers out there who seem hell bent on using engagement indices to define some unified field theory for web analytics—the master formula to end all formulas. It’s the modern, nerdy analyst equivalent of arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

Engagement is emotion, advocacy, loyalty, fraternity, connectedness, pride. If you think all this richness can be boiled down to some algorithmic permutation of click-depth, time on site, and number of RSS subscriptions, so be it. But I simply think this is too amorphous and too intangible a concept to be reduced to an equation-driven index.

And where does engagement with a website stop and engagement with a brand begin? My friend’s father is the most die hard Mercedes owner you can imagine. But he hates the web, and all the Flash content on the Mercedes website just drives the poor old man nuts. Yet he’s been preaching about their vehicles since he was 30 years old, and his advocacy has worked to the lucrative benefit of more than a few dealerships around town.

So, what is he? Site disengaged, but brand engaged? I doubt that even the most brilliant mathematician or logician could devise a metric that could juggle those two variables and put a number to his long love affair with that brand.