Chapter 4. Engage Through Experiences

Engagement Is the Energy of Social Business

My family and I just returned from a trip to Costa Rica. From the jungle to the ocean and even the volcanoes, the country engages you with activities, unique foods, and friendly people. Costa Rica’s government started the tourism focus with a “day of tourism” set up to teach the citizens of the value of tourism for the country. The strategy of tourism has been well thought out for this Central American country, with engagement of its people being at the forefront. Since 1999, tourism has earned more foreign exchange than bananas, pineapples, and coffee combined, according to Intituto Costarricense de Turismo. Costa Rica ranks first among Latin American countries.

What is engagement? Very simply, it is the way that a company or country holds the attention of its ecosystem, client, or potential client. Engagement is personal. It drives businesses to think of being not only business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C), or government to citizen (G2C), but also people to people (P2P). Engagement also means that experiences are differentiated, relevant, and valuable. Engagement is always two-way—meaning dialogue, interaction, and interest through both parties. Those parties could be client to company, or company to employee, or employee to client! Questions around engagement include these:

• How will you hold your clients’ and employees’ attention in new ways that increase interest and loyalty?

• How will you involve the client and employee more effectively and directly?

• How do you use two-way collaboration to sync with your clients and employees?

• Can you hear the voice of your customer through the vast amount of data? How about your employees?

• How can you personalize your engagement with the customer based on their online behaviors, previous experiences, and profile information?

As a leader in a Social Business, you have aligned your goals and culture per the model in Chapter 2, “Align Organizational Goals and Culture,” to support your clients and enhance your competitiveness. Your trust model, as described in Chapter 3, “Gain Social Trust,” is in place. Now, engaging your clients, employees, and other influencers is your top priority. For example, Apple’s genius bar is near-perfect support, real geniuses and scheduled help sessions that overdeliver. The recommendations of Netflix, an online video provider, provide customized user movie recommendations based on previously selected movies to promote itself as more of an entertainment advisor than a transaction site. Build-A-Bear, a business built with both offline and online experiences, adds social content like parties, websites, Facebook pages, and more to turn a product into a full experience.

Why is this a point of focus now? The customers of today and tomorrow have a different level of expectation in terms of engagement. They expect customer service teams to be customer-friendly and knowledgeable about what they tweet. If your company doesn’t have a great reputation, customers probably won’t consider your brand, and if they do decide to go with your product or offering, your teams need to be available at any time in all channels. Customers expect your company to have an experience that is like none other. On top of all that, they expect you to be able to anticipate needs before they are demanded. With the unprecedented level of focus and heightened customer exposure for every employee, honoring your customer above all else has become a mandate. I call this new client the “social client.”

The same has become true of the new employees. They expect to be social and online. They want a leadership team that is open and involves them in the decisions. Brainstorming and ad hoc teams to solve key problems are expected and required in order for this new employee to remain with your company. Millennials, those born between 1977 and 1997, expect you to use the new social tools, and 94% of them in 2011 will use online methods like LinkedIn and Facebook to find a job with your company, according to the new study by Elance, a leader in online employment and millennials. These new employees are networked 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate pervasive connectivity and collaboration. I call this new employee the “social employee.”

Throughout this chapter, the Engage workstream will help your company create exceptional experiences to attract and retain customers and employees. Engagement is real and active. The experience needs to set you apart in the marketplace and becomes a long-term competitive weapon, not just a fleeting advantage.

A Social Business has engagement through an experience—the feeling of good friends at a party, the trusted neighbor over the backyard fence, the perfect retail experience, the wisdom of the crowd. In short, this engagement will come from daily experiences with your company. A Social Business’s experiences are not a hard sell but a relationship through community activities, events, charity, and more activities that humanize the corporation.

As you continue through this chapter, remember that your customer and employee experience is strongly influenced by other relationship and transaction activities in other industries. So don’t skip over ones not in your industry. Those other industries will set the bar for your clients and employees who will want similar experiences in your industry.

Employee and Client Engagement Drives Business Results

Employee engagement drives business results.

If you look at engaged employees, there is a correlation between performance and engagement. Gallup’s Q12 (a 12-question survey designed by Gallup to predict employee and workgroup performance) defines this relationship as follows:

“Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.”

In addition, Gallup wrote this:

“The world’s top-performing organizations understand that employee engagement is a force that drives performance outcomes. In the best organizations, engagement is more than a human resources initiative—it is a strategic foundation for the way they do business.”

In May 2011, IBM published a paper called “The Essential CIO—Insights from the Global Chief Information Officer Study,” which was based on face-to-face conversations with more than 3,000 CIOs worldwide. A key result of that study showed that 66% of CIOs from top-performing organizations see internal communication and collaboration as key to innovation.

According to the Social Workplace, a leading resource for research, best practices and insights on social intranets, and employee engagement, those companies that used social techniques (Web 2.0 tools) with their employees achieved an 18% increase in engagement versus 1% among those that didn’t. And the benefits they achieved from that higher engagement with their employees were in four key areas:

• More effective client interaction

• Faster connection with experts

• Greater productivity

• Stronger recruitment and better retention

Client engagement drives strong business results.

If you now look externally at engaged clients, you see similar business results. From that same methodology, Gallup has identified 11 questions—the CE11—that measure customer engagement and link powerfully to financial performance. The 2011 study revealed that customers (both B2B and B2C) who are fully engaged represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth over the ordinary customer. Organizations that have optimized engagement have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth. Their customers buy more, spend more, return more often, and stay longer.

The 5th Annual Customer Engagement Report of more than 1,000 companies, produced by Econsultancy, a company focused on advice and insight on best-practice digital marketing, found that customer-engagement importance is growing by 5% year over year, demonstrating that the best companies are focused on increasing engagement through social techniques. The greatest increase in engagement experimentation was in the use of social networks, video, and mobile.

These are the benefits of a more engaged client:

• Higher loyalty

• Greater advocacy

• More spending

• Stronger satisfaction

At the end of 2010, IBM published a study called “Capitalizing on Complexity.” The study was conducted through insights from CEOs worldwide and was the largest CEO study ever completed. A top trend was about reinventing relationships with their customers. The study showed that 95% of standout organizations, those that outperformed on their financial results, will focus more on “getting closer to the customer” over the next 5 years because of the increased shareholder value that it brings. This makes customer engagement the numer one priority to succeed in the new economic enviroment. Standouts are especially determined to put customer engagement front and center, convinced that they must not only stay connected (or reconnect) with their customers, but also keep on learning how to strengthen those bonds.

So regardless of whether we are discussing employee or client engagement, social techniques drive higher engagement, and higher engagement drives a more competitive Social Business.

Employee Engagement with the New Social Employee

Engaged employees are those who know the company’s values and are empowered to leverage those values with their partners and clients. They know their role and understand how to reach out to the right expert. These new social employee are about commitment and success. They know that the executive team, at all levels, is open and transparent.

While this is very important, not enough companies have an employee engagement strategy in place yet. In fact, when IBM recently surveyed 700 chief human resource officers and executives, more than three-quarters (78%) said they didn’t think their companies were good at fostering collaboration or social networking. Additionally, fewer than one-quarter (21%) had increased how much they invested in the very tools that would make them more successful.

This new social employee is looking for certain things in this engagement. Michael Fauscette, who leads IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group, discussed five characteristics of the new social employees in order for companies to engage them in the workforce.

Social employees do the following:

• Look for coaches and mentors, not “bosses.”

• Want empowerment to take on business problems without micromanaging but within established guidelines.

• Need the freedom and ability to form ad hoc workgroups as needed to address business issues and problems, including those external.

• Demand open and transparent executives.

• Desire an inclusive decision-making culture.

Your social employee engagement strategy needs to include the capability to provide feedback, have frequent communications, form relationships, share desired experiences, and brainstorm solutions. For example, IBM has a program for new employees called Succeeding@IBM. For the first 6 to 12 months after new hires join the company, they are part of a social networking group where they collaborate on topics and get to know other folks outside of their immediate departments. This engagement experience helps with networking on a worldwide basis, a key skill for today’s global workforce. It also gives new employees a broader base of knowledge that they can tap into as they adapt to their new jobs and culture.

For employee engagement, I would measure these factors:

• Employee sentiment (how your employees feel about issues in real time): For example, many leading companies are using social analytics tools to pull out of company blogs, wikis, and other social networking forums inside the four walls of a company the insight on how their employees feel about the company, policies, and overall issues. Many leadership companies are now doing this instead of doing yearly company surveys that are dated as soon as they are released.

• Crowdsourcing (new innovations and ideas from employees): For example, IBM held a “ThinkFuture” event. ThinkFuture is a four-day, online, collaborative event bringing together IBMers around the world to brainstorm and strategize on the future of leadership and talent development. The first 24 hours were spent web-streaming workshops to participants around the world; the next three days were spent in an online discussion forum that IBM calls a “Jam.” There were 2,617 registered participants for the Jam, generating 3,579 posts.

After IBM’s analytics experts helped analyze the results, IBM commissioned five teams of early-career HR professionals from around the world to tackle major areas of insight. The first results from those teams are powerful and very forward-thinking—the first steps in a multistage strategic planning and implementation process that will unfold over the next decade at IBM. Measuring the power of this collective intelligence and the value it brings to tactical and strategic issues is a key metric to consider.

• Increased productivity: For example, Konecranes is a company based in Finland that focuses on “lifting” businesses that offers a complete range of advanced lifting solutions to many different industries worldwide. They engaged their employees through an internal community to enable the finding of experts in a more effective manner. Some employees would need to find people who know about lifttrucks and speak Russian, for instance. Using this internal community, they increased their employees’ engagement with other experts, which led to double-digit improvement in their productivity.

• Network density: Your network consists of your colleagues that you communicate and collaborate with. By measuring the density of someone’s network over time, you can understand whether they are expanding their reach and continuing to network with new people. By looking at the density with a 2D view, you can correlate who that individual collaborates with most, as well as get a better understanding of their physical location. The goal is to ensure that your teams have the geographic and organizational structure to enable people to become “connected” beyond their immediate team.

Client Engagement with the New Social Client

An engaged client is one who is attentive, interested, and active in their support for your brand, product, or company. The depth of their conversations online showcases their knowledge and care. They recommend and passionately advocate on your behalf in the blogosphere. This new social client marks the end of the ordinary customer, however. Based on how the social client acts online, you will need to engage them in different ways. Here are three profiles that I typically look at for client engagement:

• Tippers: Those who influence the rest of the clients and potential clients; usually about 5% to 10% of your product or category’s population (see Chapter 3 for more details). Engagement with your tippers needs to be deep and knowledgeable with a big emphasis on active listening.

• Active participants: Those who sometimes comment while acquiring information and knowledge. Engagement with your active participants will be based on how to pull them into more active involvement with your brand.

• Passive participants: Those who use social tools only to acquire information and knowledge. They do not comment or share their thoughts and opinions. Some articles call these folks “lurkers.” They lurk around the information but do not take an active part in it.

This new social client is looking for certain things in this engagement:

• Social clients who are tippers:

• Look for involvement in new products, messaging, service, and beyond.

• Want rewards, public sponsorship, recognition of their influence.

• Social clients who are active participants:

• Look for ease in ability to participate, add comments, rank content, “Like” pages, or link to common sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

• Want rewards, honors, recognition.

• Social clients who are passive participants:

• Look for relevancy.

• Want fun, different, compelling experiences.

Your social client engagement strategy needs the ability to customize given the client. For example, at IBM’s Lotusphere® 2011 conference, with more than 5,000 attendees, IBM set up engagement for all types of social clients. For instance, for our tippers, we had a blogging VIP area and “check-in” points for location-based service tools like Gowalla where we awarded those clients who checked into the most places. For greater involvement, we offered greater incentives and recognition. We also enabled our active participants to play a role through “TweetUps” (networking events that occur from tweeting the location of the place that everyone comes to around a discussion topic) and ensured that the engagement with colleagues was fast, easy, and fun. For our passive participants, our “Social Media Aggregator,” a single integrated social dashboard for all tweets, videos, blogs, Livestream, and more, was a way that they could keep up with all that was happening around the venue with a single view of the event (see Figure 4.1)!

Figure 4.1 IBM Lotusphere 2011 social client engagement

Client engagement is not easy to measure. Altimeter Group’s Survey of Corporate Social Strategists, from late 2010, found that social strategists struggle with relying on engagement data, as illustrated in Figure 4.2. Even though 65% of strategists need engagement metrics for evaluating the success of their program, no standard metrics existed.

Figure 4.2 Social strategists struggle with relying on engagement data.

Source: Survey of Corporate Social Strategists, Altimeter Group, November 2010

Until standard metrics are identified, I would measure and report on different metrics based on the type of reporting I was doing and to what level of the organization. The Altimeter Group’s Survey of Corporate Social Strategists shows that speaking to the level of the person with whom you are working, as illustrated in Figure 4.3, really makes a lot of sense.

Figure 4.3 The ROI pyramid

For instance, if I were speaking to the business executive team, I would talk about the value of engagement on revenue or conversion of a potential client into buying their first product, offering, or service with your company. For example, GoMidjets, a U.S.-based software company, began their engagement strategy as a Social Business by strong participation in technical forums, communities, and Jam sessions. They solicited feedback on their latest software product, and began to see new clients come in from these engagements. In fact, GoMidjets founder Tamir Gefen says that of his new client conversions, over 40% of his leads come from this very “hands on” engagement in communities that lead right to his bottom line.

If you are speaking to the business stakeholders, I would talk about the value of client engagement on the following:

• Awareness and client sentiment: Awareness is a measure of a brand being known in the marketplace, and sentiment is the way people view what you are doing either positively or negatively. For example, when Apple released the iPad, 73% of circulated tweets were favorable toward the iPad, but 26% expressed disappointment (or negative sentiment) that the iPad could not replace the iPhone, according to a study from Attensity, a company that focuses on the empowered client. This negative sentiment can be leveraged extensively to improve.

• Innovation of ideas from outside your four walls: Given the focus on crowdsourcing, or having the blogosphere collaborate on a problem online to come up with the best solution, one of the top outcomes to look at for business leaders is the number of new ideas that came from the client engagement. For example, IBM launched a new software design and development initiative called The IBM Liquid Challenge Program. The purpose of the program is to find the world’s best talent to design and develop innovative software applications for IBM. As a Liquid Player (freelancer), a person is challenged to develop key components of IBM’s new applications on a weekly basis. This exciting opportunity rewards designers/developers on successful components and helps Liquid Players to create their digital reputation. The key metric of success for this Liquid Challenge will be the number of new ideas generated from the crowd that are viable, usable, and successful!

If you are speaking to the community managers, I would talk about the value of engagement in terms of the following:

• Responses (how many comments and responses are you getting to polling, blogs, discussion threads): A good measure of engagement is the ratios of responses and comments to blogs/polls/discussion items, and the like, to get a true feel for how engaged the community is around a topic.

• New knowledge acquired: The best community managers also measure new ideas, thoughts, or opinions that they get through the community. Adam Cranfield, Director/Consultant at Form Digital Consulting and former community manager at a variety of companies, told me he measures “nuggets.” A nugget is a new insight gained from the community. For example, Home Depot started a community around home improvement videos on YouTube. One community member showed a video on how to alter a product sold at Home Depot to make it easier to install in a home. Home Depot took that video and set up a meeting with the supplier, who changed the product based on this “nugget” of information from the community!

• Active participants and tippers in the community: Community managers want to know if they have a lot of influence in the community or passive participants. Although this is not just a numbers game, the numbers help you gauge new interest and growth in the community.

These are not all the metrics of engagement you will want to explore but some ideas that you will want to shape based on your company’s goals and culture. Chapter 7, “Analyze Your Data,” covers how many of these items can be measured and compared against your competitors and industry as well.

Principles of Engagement

Before moving on to engagement examples, I wanted to lay out the overall principles of engagement. A big question that I often hear companies struggle with is, who does the engaging? Is it the employee, company, or product? Actually, it could be all three or any of the three, depending on your engagement strategy.

For example, products can be the focus of engagement. Pratt & Whitney is a world leader in the design, manufacture, and service of aircraft engines, space propulsion systems, and industrial gas turbines. They decided to have their clients engage with their new engine, the F135, through Facebook and Twitter to effectively lobby the U.S. government to use their engine. To date, they have effectively had more than 300,000 engagements of people with their F135 engine!

Your strategy could be to do all three. For example, IBM has engagement with the following:

• Employees: blogs, products of offerings

• Product or concepts: Watson, the machine that played on Jeopardy, has his own Facebook and Twitter accounts

• Company: IBM has an official Twitter ID

Some basic guidelines I recommend when deciding which of the strategies to implement are these:

• Employees: I highly recommend that every company enable their employees to engage with clients and potential clients, as well as with other employees and leadership. If you don’t want them engaging with clients in the consumer space (Twitter, Facebook, Google Talk), then consider providing alternative and more secure means that are controlled by your organization. There are a variety of Software as a Service (SaaS) or cloud solutions available.

• Product or company: The decision to have engagement at a product or company level to me is dependent on your goals. If you want people to relate to a particular product, then I would consider a strategy to engage the product. But if you have multiple products and limited Social Business Managers, I would consider focusing on the company. If you do decide to go down this path, make sure that the person(s) responsible for the product or company are experts in that subject matter. That is, don’t just give the responsibility of a product ID over to a PR person; have that product ID be owned and managed by the team responsible for the product.

For example, Quantum, a storage software company, launched a major new software upgrade for its storage products. While this product was critical, they focused their engagement strategy through Twitter, Facebook, and SlideShare (a location that openly shares PowerPoint^® content) on their company, not just the product. They used the launch of the product as the compelling reason to engage with the company. According to the company, it was a success. Quantum mentions on Twitter increased 250% during the announcement, and retweets and recommendations increased in double digits, including links to their new SlideShare presentation.

On the other hand, Procter & Gamble, a world leader in consumer products, decided to have engagement at the product levels for their brands. For example, Pampers directly engages mothers in the Pampers Fit Stop campaign in stores as well as online with their Pampers Village website. Their focus on the “Parenting Network” engages through providing access to subject matter experts like child-development gurus and medical professionals. The “Ask an Expert” section puts visitors directly in touch with the experts, who offer answers to questions about a variety of parenting concerns, such as feeding and sleeping habits.

The difference in engagement tactics reflects as much size as strategy of the company in dialoguing with their clients. While this is an important part of the strategy, the principles of engagement are the same for leveraging a product, a company, or an employee as the cornerstone of the engagement.

The following six principles of engagement are great rules to leverage as you develop your strategy:

1. Focus on a goal for your engagement: Define your goals upfront. These goals will drive your overall engagement strategy. Zappos, a company owned by Amazon.com that focuses on being the best shoe provider in the world, published their community goals in terms of their Family Core Values (http://about.zappos.com/our-unique-culture/zappos-core-values). These values drive their engagement online. For example, the core value “deliver WOW through service” drives an engagement in customer service that differentiates it from any other company in the world. The focus is the value of the WOW play, not cost or efficiency. And Zappos is not the only one. Many companies are doing a “company to customer pact” to write out the social agreement on rules and goals for engagement. Check out www.ccpact.com.

2. Focus on your subject matter expertise and value to the reader, not on selling: Your engagement strategy is not your sales strategy, but how you form a relationship. For example, a small dry cleaner in New York started a Twitter account, not on his business, but about his expertise of taking care of clothes like taking stains out. His value proposition as posted on Twitter: “Dry cleaner to the stars. Have been profiled in the NYT, NY Mag, and TimeOutNY. Here to give away free tips and news about garment care, and to learn from you.” It worked because it engaged on a subject of value that eventually grew his overall business.

3. Be consistent in commenting and engaging, driven by a great community manager: To engage and hold someone’s interest, you need to be consistent in your comments and dialogues. This is where the community manager becomes so important (see Chapter 3) in maintaining the level of activity. A great community manager can make all the difference in the world, and, in my mind, is a requirement of success. A community manager’s responsibility is to keep the community members active and engaged by setting the strategy, gaining the trust of the members, and ensuring the appropriate content activation plan. While the community manager stimulates conversation, this cannot be the only person from your company who is active in the community. Put your best out there and motivate them to be consistent.

In fact, we have spent quite a bit of time in this book on the importance of community managers. I recommend that you read through the community management report from Rachel Happe to really understand this new type of role and employee in your company. It’s available at http://www.slideshare.net/rhappe/the-2011-state-of-community-management.

According to the 4Q 2010 ComBlu report (http://comblu.com/news/social-media/the-state-of-online-branded-communities-2010.aspx), of the 241 communities from 78 enterprise-level companies in the U.S., almost half of all companies had no visible community manager. ComBlu found that those companies that do have a community manager are the most successful. One of my favorite examples is the Jimmy Choo Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/JimmyChoo) where the active community manager sets up polls and surveys, and stirs up conversation.

4. Have a content strategy: Social businesses require a content strategy to truly engage. If your content or information is not fresh, not relevant, or not valuable, then people will go elsewhere. Think of content as the aggregation of voices. Information coming from your employees, marketing, development, and other functions will make the message stronger. I encourage companies to distribute to their tippers and active participants key facts and information that they can then blog/tweet/comment on in their own voice.

Take, for instance, the Indium Corporation, a premier materials supplier to the global electronics, semiconductor, solar, thin film, and thermal management markets. For their engagement strategy for content, they leverage their Point of View content to keep their content fresh and engaging. With the impact of this content strategy, 14 Indium engineers blog consistently about their thoughts on the vision and direction. Just a note, these 14 people are not full-time people but blog as part of their overall thought-leadership agenda as part of their regular jobs. This approach is fairly simple to execute but the payoff is that it enables the clients to get to know Indium as a company, thought leader, and friend. A great Social Business content strategy requires continuous, steady investment to build and manage the network, with eventual value created as the network grows. Many companies have their community manager drive the content strategy.

5. Focus on relationships, not numbers: Engagement is about a relationship. The relationship must be established, maintained, and nurtured. The focus shouldn’t be on “making the numbers.” For example, Melanie Baker, the community manager at PostRank, focuses on forging relationships. She is the Technology Triangle’s longest-serving community manager and is much loved. In addition, @PaughGinney from Brazen Careerist (www.brazencareerist.com) focuses on relationships. The site was just named one of Mashable’s “top 5 online communities” for starting your career, and the members rave about their personal relationships with him as one of the main reasons. Contrast that with Moonfruit (www.moonfruit.com), a free website builder that ran a Twitter sweepstakes to gain momentum in the market. It seems to have worked because its website had a huge spike in traffic following the promotion. Afterward, the traffic plummeted back down to normal. The mistake Moonfruit made was that they focused on the number of visitors, not the lasting relationships they could have formed with the visitors.

6. Integrate social techniques: The linkage between the social tools that you choose matters. So if your Twitter, blog, and Facebook pages are not in sync in terms of message, you will have an issue in portraying your brand in a way that is effective. Yes, this is management 101, but many people forget these rules in the virtual world. The most successful Social Businesses leverage social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in a unique but consistent way to build off one another.

For example, at the Super Bowl in 2011, Volkswagen, a German car manufacturer, integrated its Twitter hashtag, Facebook game, and YouTube commercials into a comprehensive focus. This integration strategy enabled one of the emerging best practices in the aggregation of the message as a way to grow engagement for Social Businesses. It worked! Sentiment is evaluated by social mention in terms of three basic categories: positive, negative, and neutral social media comments. This is shown as a ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are not. Volkswagen’s Beetle had the highest ratio after the Super Bowl at 69:1—that’s 69 good social media comments compared to 1 bad one. They not only engaged, they engaged in an extremely positive fashion!

And this is not just for large businesses. Richard Scott of Richard Scott Salon and Day Spa, a medium-size business in Westchester County in New York, has integrated his Facebook offers and Foursquare into running his overall business, leveraging those great relationship and word-of-mouth skills that occur naturally in his salon and taking those relationships to the next level. He has grown his business and visits by new clients in double digits due to this brilliant integrated strategy.

How Do You Engage?

To leverage these principles of engagement most effectively, there are three essential techniques that we have found have the greatest success rate. I call these the Three I’s:

• Interact (mobile, gaming, gifting, location-based services, crowdsourcing)

• Integrate (online, offline)

• Identify (content, emotion, personalize)

Note that each of these is a two-way engagement:

• To interact means that your clients or employees become active participants. For example, in gaming, they are playing the game, as you are teaching and instructing them in a fun way.

• To integrate means that your company will have online and offline engagements that fit together to form a full picture of your company. So you will not see one view in an event online and a different personality of the company in a store. If you are not integrated in your approach, engagement is weakened.

• In identification, the key is to identify with your clients or employees and to personalize your approach in engaging with them. Your goal is to provide them an experience that is just for them. They comment on your blog because it speaks in their voice, or about their passion, and gets them involved.

Engagement is a long-term strategy. There are short-term benefits but it is not a strategy that can be done in a typical fast-and-dirty fashion. Social clients and employees are interested not in engagement “drive-bys” (meaning only one dialogue or comment) but in really getting to know your company, product, or employees. This next section highlights the key best practices for Interact, Integrate, and Identify, with a few case studies to really engage you, the reader!

Use the sheet illustrated in Figure 4.4 to track your progress.

Figure 4.4 Action sheet

Interact

Anything becomes engaging when your client or employee plays a role in it. If you provide your clients with an opportunity to make choices about content, process, and product, then you increase their willingness to engage you. Your company needs to create an environment so that your clients, potential clients, and employees can apply their own analysis and evaluation. While there are many ways to interact, this section discusses the most effective methods of interaction with your clients and employees. Those top experiences include mobile, gaming, virtual gifting, location-based services, and video.

The choice of the engagement tool will be based on your company’s goal and importance of that tool with your clients and employees. In addition, I will provide you a sneak peek into some of the new engagement tools coming in the future that you may want to start exploring in experimentation mode.

The following case studies illustrate some of these concepts.

Mobile

To interact implies that an engaging experience needs to be convenient. Mobile devices are everywhere, so a strong engagement strategy for employees and clients is mobile, simply based on convenience and availability. Most of the basic social tools leverage mobile as well. For instance, according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, over 40% of all tweets come from mobile devices.

MobiThinking, a world leader in mobile research, predicts that mobile device usage is growing with no end in sight (http://mobithinking.com/stats-corner/global-mobile-statistics-2011-all-quality-mobile-marketing-research-mobile-web-stats-su). With 77% of the world’s population now having a mobile phone, and more than 5.3 billion mobile subscribers, there is no other medium that offers that reach and interaction. Over 85% of new handsets will have mobile web access in 2011, and there will be more than one billion mobile Internet users worldwide by 2013. Traditional phone sales still outnumber smartphones 4:1, so your mobile strategy needs to target all phone users equally. The interaction a client has with a company over a mobile device impacts the client’s overall views about the company. Per MobiThinking, a client who is satisfied with a mobile experience is 30% more likely to buy from that company, recommend it, and be loyal to the brand.

The key elements to consider for the mobile portion of your engagement strategy are these:

• Mobile networking (like Twitter, or your own community)

• Mobile coupons and gift cards

• Mobile website

• Mobile experiences

• Mobile crowdsourcing

Gaming

As business and organizational leaders, we need to consider the role of gaming dynamics for customer and employee engagement. Gaming can spark creativity and new opportunities for both B2B and B2C interaction. Serious gaming is the use of gaming techniques in the business world. Rick Gibson of Games Investor Consulting says “analysts estimate that 50% of companies will have ‘gamified’ [leveraged serious gaming techniques] by 2015. That’s 13.5 million businesses in the U.S. alone.” Serious gaming is the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and educate via engaging users. By the pure definition, “serious” means they are games designed for a purpose other than pure entertainment.

The goal of these games could be to train, advertise, generate demand, or simply energize the user. Gaming does vary in its business use. It could be a simple game on an iPhone like the Infinite Banking Concept game (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/infinite-banking-concept-game/id417938367?mt=80), which showcases a contest to span a four-year period of time during which five methods of financing a car are compared, or Barclaycard Waterslide Extreme, a game based on Barclaycard’s “iconic” waterslide advertisement, which focuses on the brand image (Barclay’s game was been downloaded more than two million times during the first week of introduction). Both of these games were built for the purpose of making the brand more fun.

Research into human behavior demonstrates that people are motivated by challenges that feel inherently worthwhile. Both the scholarly literature on games and the real-world experience of game designers demonstrate that people will compete for extraordinarily low-value prizes, or no prizes at all, when the experience itself is the reward. Companies and governments are beginning to use the elements of games and competitions to motivate employees, customers, and communities. This phenomenon has become known as gamification.

In using gaming for education, a game has about 80% higher recall than traditional education. Consider this for your employees. Because most people today play some form of game, will employees be satisfied solving problems in typical ways or will gaming be demanded? For example, if players organize themselves to successfully complete specific endeavors during their “play” time, will they be content during work hours in organizational structures, with central command and control? Chances are they’re more likely to want to work on virtual teams distributed around the world, undertaking multiple endeavors, taking advantage of the thought processes that succeeded for them in online gaming.

Consider gaming concepts to help managers assemble a high-performance team to solve a problem. Most managers look at a pool of candidates and pick the top performers based on résumé, past experience, and interviews. Now consider a similar concept of assembling a high-performance car for an automotive game. The gamer will select different parts of the car (tires, frame, engine, size, etc.) with an overall weighted score so they can easily view how the entire car will perform when all the parts are put together. Now let’s apply that concept to high-performance teams. Imagine if the manager could select and unselect certain candidates for his or her team and collectively see a weighted score of how the entire team will function together. That would provide a level of predictive analysis to help assemble a team that has the highest probability of success using gaming techniques.

Gaming could be used in businesses to create an experience that is compelling. Take Groupon. From Groupon’s website, their history is interesting. They grew out of a website called The Point that let you start a campaign asking people to give money or do something as a group—but only once a “tipping point” number of people agree to participate. By delaying action until enough people come together to have a real impact, The Point helps consumers, employees, citizens, activists, parents—or anyone—come together and solve problems that they couldn’t solve alone. Groupon then took this to the next level for city dwellers because there is so much to do that it is overwhelming. By focusing on one item of goods or service each day, Groupon makes it simple. And by leveraging The Point’s framework for collective buying, Groupon is able to offer deals that make it very difficult to say no.

Groupon uses serious gaming as part of its business model. For example, it gives out a “free lunch” by giving steep discounts, it has a time element with the clock ticking on each deal, and it encourages team play by having a “tipping point” before the deal is active. All of these are part of serious gaming strategies. Gap announced that it made $11 million worth of sales in a single day on Groupon!

Overall gaming impacts customer experience, and profits. Using games to engage has a compelling value proposition. When well implemented, a game can virally target people in a specific demographic where they live in a medium they love and understand. The games can then be used to gather information about the player and even generate leads. Almost every company will have to adapt to this new gaming generation as either customers or employees. This new business environment is emerging.

According to The Apply Group, a marketing consultant, at least 100 of the Global Fortune 500 will use gaming to educate their employees by 2012, with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany leading the way. The average age of a gamer today is between 25 and 44 years old, with an average income between $35,000 and $75,000. Also, 58% are men and over 42% are women gamers. Games are popular today across the world.

Mobile social gaming is on the rise—and women are leading the way. Social gaming is engaging by nature—using teachable moments and learning from peers to gain the interest of the audience. Many popular games exist today. One popular game on Facebook is called FarmVille, with more than 80 million users, where over 62% of players are female with an average income of between $60,000 and $100,000. The largest demographic group playing FarmVille are actually stay-at-home moms (source: Zynga, the company that produces FarmVille).

The key elements to consider for the gaming portion of your engagement strategy are the following:

• Build or include? Build your own game or include yourself in someone else’s game.

• Goal of the game: education, demand generation, awareness.

• Metrics of success.

Virtual Gifting

A virtual gift is an online image or picture of an object that your company or an employee might give to someone. It is not a real item or object but exists only in the virtual world. For example, at IBM’s IMPACT conference, in the virtual world, we gave away virtual “hex” necklaces that spelled out words using only 0’s and 1’s. In our internal virtual gifting strategy, we have employees present blue ribbons of “thanks” as a virtual gifting to show appreciation and teaming from other employees.

As part of a Social Business strategy, virtual gifting can supplement your engagement with clients and employees. As you can see from the preceding examples, context plays a major role in type of gift, and placement of gift. In addition, in all cases the ability to showcase the gift is an important item. Promotional value links to the gift’s context, use, and perceived value by its recipient. Your virtual gifting strategy will depend on where you are offering the gift and to whom. The goal of virtual gifting is to engage through trial—virtual trial of goods that retailers and manufacturers have been doing for years. It is just as effective in the virtual world as it is in the real world. Think through if and how virtual gifting can be part of your engagement strategy because of the results that it brings.

Virtual gifting is a great way to engage your audience. Fifty-seven percent believe virtual gifting is as meaningful as real gifting, and according to Magid’s report “Media Futures 2010 Wireless and Consumers,” Americans spent $168 million on mobile virtual goods in the past year, with 45% of smartphone owners playing mobile games and 16% of those spending an average of $41 per year on in-game virtual goods. In 2011, 72% of respondents planned to send virtual goods as a gift on Valentine’s Day. And 31% of people who planned to send a virtual gift on Valentine’s Day would be purchasing their first virtual good.

Big brands are leveraging virtual gifting not to just build revenue through a strong loyalty strategy. This strategy is leveraged not just by online dating services, but also by big businesses like Pepsi, Coke, IBM, Nordstrom, Volkswagen, Volvo, Toyota, and the list goes on. For example, H&M, a Swedish clothing retailer, launched a virtual-goods campaign in a social game called MyTown (MyTown is a location-based gaming service). While showing off its denim and blue garments (they called it the Blues), they engaged consumers and enticed them to shop in the real store! With more than 700,000 players, they gave away virtual goods throughout to drive real-world sales.

Location-Based Services

One new area for interaction is location-based services (LBS). An LBS uses the geographic positioning system (GPS) feature of a mobile device to engage at the geographic location where your client or employee is currently located. It provides not only the ability to make interaction fun, but the ability for companies to deliver entertaining and interactive experiences when needed or desired. And, of course, we all know that it is all about location, location, location!

What does an LBS enable you to do? It allows you to find out where your clients or friends are, to learn their favorite places in cities or stores, and to locate others in a common location (I used it at BlogHer, the world’s largest women’s blogging conference, to locate a group of folks I had never met in person, but wanted to!). From your mobile device, you can “check in” to the LBS to indicate that you are at a certain location and find others who are there, get the top tips for that location, and more.

One of my favorite quotes that I heard at the Austin, Texas–based South by Southwest (SXSW) Social Media festival is “the future of mobile is local.” Fifty-five percent of all text messages ask some form of the question “Where are you?” With billions of mobile users globally, location-based services will be the next phase of Social Business engagement strategy.

How are companies using LBS? Today, it is being used in a variety of ways by tying your physical location to your social areas of interests.

These are the primary uses:

• Discounts based on location

• Information based on location

• Recognition for an event

For example, retail and commerce-based customers are leveraging LBS to offer marketing promotions and discounts to shoppers. At SXSW, if you checked in, you could get a free ride in downtown Austin from Chevy as part of their SXSW promotion. Governments, libraries, and cities are using LBS to make it easier to find information or directions when you are in their location. Library usage is so popular now that in February 2011 there was a full conference on leveraging location-based services for libraries in which Joe Murphy, a leading innovator and trend spotter and Science Librarian at Yale University Libraries, spoke on “Location Aware Technology for Libraries.” Technology companies (like IBM) are using it at events to direct traffic to particular demos or sessions and to create a SWARM. A SWARM is a badge that proclaims you had more than 50 people checked in at the event or location. And restaurants are leveraging it to draw a crowd on a particular night, hyping up the SWARM badge.

These are the main LBS tools:

• Foursquare: Foursquare hit the seven-million-user mark at the time of publishing, with 40% of its users outside the United States. According to Foursquare, they grew 3400% from 2009 to 2010, and had more than 381 million check-ins. Marc Jacobs, Toronto Reference Library, Dominos, Starbucks, IBM, and Intel are all using Foursquare today, according to Foursquare’s latest website stats.

• Gowalla: Gowalla is an application similar to Foursquare. They have about one million users and have tried to differentiate themselves on new features and functions. They added a check-in facility so that from within Gowalla, a user can also check in with Foursquare. Most recently, they added a “Highlights feature,” in which each location would have a set of highlights as a value-add for users. Their vision was to turn the world into a “social atlas.”

• Jiepang: Jiepang is China’s version of Foursquare, with the same functionality, but with a very local flavor and a more plain and simple interface. For instance, restaurants and food are big areas of focus in China so Jiepang focused there for their introduction. They built a directory of restaurants in most major cities in China that made the service usable and valuable instantly. (At press time, China has blocked both Foursquare and Gowalla, favoring Jiepang.)

Make sure you familiarize yourself with these tools as the following case studies showcase real business examples around them.

Video

According to YouTube, over 13 million hours of video was uploaded in 2010 and around 35 hours’ worth of video is being uploaded every minute! And the amount of video viewed is growing over 56% year over year. YouTube is now the second-largest search engine on the Web, with 50% of YouTube’s 300 million users going there at least once a week (source: en.gauge Media 2011 report “The Shift Report”).

Video is a power booster to your engagement strategy, with interactivity occurring as users generate content and learn from others. A video hosting service allows individuals to upload video clips to an Internet website. The video host will then store the video on its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view this video.

Some of the interesting tools in this space are YouTube, Ustream, Youku, Tudou, OoVoo, and Chatzppl. For example, 32% of YouTube’s viewers watch health videos—more than food or celebrity links. So if you are a healthcare provider or a pharmaceutical company, this tool is truly one way to engage your audience.

As technology continues to advance and networks can better handle large data transfers, some companies are starting to leverage live video streaming or video chats. For example, for all of IBM’s Major Technology Events, we livestream the keynote addresses from our Social Media Aggregation page. Unlike uploading an already-recorded video, live video streaming is in real time, allowing participants viewing the stream access to the people, content, and information as it happens.

Video streaming is very popular in announcing new products to market where you can have customers, analyst, and press all attending remotely to see the announcement as it takes place. This method of video collaboration is also more engaging. Since it’s real time, remote participants can ask questions and interact with the speaker as required.

Video is a powerful part of your engagement strategy.

Future Engagement Tool Experimentation

There are three new engagement tools that have not had solid business results to date but that to me show promise of future engagement. I believe that this experimentation will change the way we interact with brands of all kinds.

First, there is now a new way to allow automated or what is known as “hyperpassive” check-ins. An automated check-in means that a store or location has a device to automatically check you into their location to offer you coupons or intrinsic rewards without the client or potential client having to actively check in. The application could be in a bank, where you check in a person who walks through the door, to see what types of clients use the banking office, vs. an ATM to offer the appropriate services based on their patterns of visitation.

Second, there are new services like Assisted Serendipity that will offer companies more information based on location. According to its site, Assisted Serendipity is a free service that notifies you as soon as the male/female ratio turns in your favor at your favorite local hangouts. Using Foursquare’s check-in data, they monitor the venues you are interested in, and notify you as soon as the ratio “tips.” A business usage of this technology could be if your target market was around mothers and you wanted to offer a particular discount in the store when you had more moms present, or even tailor a demonstration based on who is in a store: a cooking demonstration vs. a demonstration on the latest power tool! Knowing when you will maximize the use of that discount or demo to your targeted audience would be valuable information in your strategy.

Finally, there are RFID bands that people wear that can be used to store your social networking profiles. According to en.gauge media’s 2011 The Shift report, more than 96% of people between the ages of 18 and 25 have a social networking profile. With these RFID bands, companies can have a real-world association with the virtual world of Facebook, Communities and beyond. Below are two case studies of companies experimenting with this technology in Europe.

Integrate

Being able to integrate your client’s and employee’s experience across different business processes, social tools, and audiences is critical. Imagine watching an ad, being totally engaged in its content, and then when you go onto the Web, you have a completely different experience. Or imagine that you had a customer service experience that was completely different from your engagement in crowdsourcing or in marketing.

The examples that I shared in the preceding section focused on one element of a company’s strategy, but trust that all the processes were integrated around tools, goals, and purpose. As you engage the audience, remember that most people use more than one social tool such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, as well as many more, and they talk via the blogosphere with reporters, clients, employees, and beyond. Also know that they engage with you in more than one business process: marketing, client support, product innovation, communications, sales, and more. You need to ensure that your engagement strategy has an integrated message and approach. Imagine that every digital touch point is part of your online brand ecosystem.

The areas of integration to plan for are the following:

• Business processes (more on this in Chapter 5, “[Social] Network Your Business Processes”)

• Social tools

• Ecosystem (employees, clients, reporters, influencers, etc.)

The case studies in the sections that follow illustrate some of these concepts.

Identify with Emotion and Personal Connection

Never underplay the emotional connection that comes from a personalized experience. The fact that you can identify with customers and their pain, or the way they came to your website, is important. Your company needs all the key elements that make up an exceptional experience that will attract customers. A great customer experience provides detailed personalization based on behavior-driven web analytics.

Personalization is based on the interests of an individual. It implies that the changes are based on implicit data, such as items purchased or pages viewed. The term customization is used instead when the site uses only explicit data such as ratings or preferences. For example, if a user lands on your product page because of an ad they clicked on in Facebook, behavior personalization will profile that user as a “social user,” and thus that product page will be customized and offer more social capabilities, communities, or friends of Facebook who also like this page. If a different user lands on the same product page because of an ad they clicked on in YouTube, the behavior personalization will profile that user as a “video user,” and thus that product page will be customized and offer more media and video capabilities. In both examples, it is the same product page, but using behavioral-driven personalization based on web analytics, the display can change based on the characteristic of the user and the user’s online behavior.

There are a variety of personalization techniques for providing an exceptional experience. Some of the most common techniques are these:

• Role-based personalization: Having access to the information that is relevant to my job (or segment).

• Rule-based personalization: Showing or sending information based on knowledge we have of the customer controlled by business logic (rules).

• Behavior-driven personalization: Showing or sending information based on the user’s online browsing behavior.

• Collaborative filtering: Making recommendations to the user based on other users’ selections.

• Adaptive web personalization: Preselecting options based on what this user has selected before.

Personalization is a key in engagement because customers get what they want to see (and keep coming back). The case studies that follow provide some real-world examples of the personalization aspect of engagement.

The case studies in the sections that follow illustrate some of these concepts.

Conclusion

Engagement is a personal connection, a relationship.

Understanding the new social employee and social client is important to set the right expectations. Recognition that they now exist is the first step!

The principles of engagement direct your company on a set of simple but important goals. These exceptional experiences help your company to bond with your clients, employees, and influencers.

By focusing on engagement based on your goals, engagement can be strengthened with interaction, integration, and identification. Whether you are beginning inside your four walls or outside, the engagement strategy is crucial to your exceptional experience. As we saw with numerous examples, these engagement experiences make your company more relevant in your space.

This is not for the faint of heart but takes resources and a focus on developing a longer-term perspective; however, it is worth the effort with bigger returns than a simple focus on leads. Before you move onto the next chapter, define your engagement strategy, how your clients and employees have changed, and what the key points are that you want to ensure are addressed in your Social Business governance model.

Chapter 5 continues with a look at how the Social Business AGENDA can help you across your business processes.