Driving Engagement

The holy grail of marketing – particularly digital marketing, and most particularly social media marketing – is engagement. The two-way, conversational nature of social media enables companies and brands to see in real time how people are responding to what they’re saying and doing. Not only does social media provide an immediate feedback loop, it also comes with built-in measurement and metrics that can – used right – help organisations understand in more detail the extent to which they have genuinely engaged current and potential customers.

If individuals share content produced by companies or brands on their personal timelines or feeds without comment, the creator of that content can assume that the person doing the sharing believes it’s worth sharing. They can’t be certain that they like or approve of the content – they might be sharing it without comment to a loyal following who all know, without accompanying editorial commentary, that a share means “look at what these idiots are saying now”. This trope is common when sharing content from contentious politicians and journalists (think Donald Trump and Katie Hopkins, though both of them often have abuse added at the top of a share or retweet).

But in general, when an individual shares content put out by an organ-isation, it’s fairly safe to assume that the person sharing approves of the content they’re passing on. The act of sharing anything involves attaching a little piece of the person sharing to the content shared. In the least active way possible, they’re endorsing what they’re sharing by saying to their followers, “I think you should look at this, too”.

If the person doing the sharing actively likes or favourites content from an organisation, the organisation can assume with greater confidence that they approve of the content. And if people share content and add a comment, the words, phrases, and sentiment used alongside the share give companies and brands a good idea of what they actually thought about the content they’re sharing. Of course, people often share or retweet and add a hostile comment (think Trump and Hopkins again), but the fresh content on top of the original content makes it completely transparent what the sharer intends by sharing.

The act of sharing is actually comparatively rare. It is estimated that even the most active Twitter users, for instance, only see a maximum of 4% of all tweets that pass over their timeline from those accounts they follow. It is rare for users to like or retweet more than 1% of those tweets they do see, except in the special case of fans of celebrities, who often like and retweet almost everything a Justin Bieber or a Katie Perry ever posts.

When a Twitter user does retweet or like tweets, these have the potential to be seen by that user’s followers, though based on the 4% figure above, if a given user has 1,000 followers, no more than 40 of them would be expected to see the like or retweet. Social media engagement can quickly become a game of diminishing returns.

Because social and digital media channels are still relatively young, and because companies, brands, and other organisations using them are mostly fairly naive about what engagement is and what drives it, a good number of third-party businesses have been set up to measure and report on engagement. The products and services these companies offer can map how far particular pieces of content travel, the extent to which they’re shared, how many people they have reached, and so how engaging the content is deemed to be. Just take what they say with a pinch of salt, particularly the unjustifiably ubiquitous Klout score.

There are three challenges with the engagement scores and ratings these companies provide:

1. They are usually only absolute and not relative, and there’s no sense about what is a good engagement score and what is not so good.
2. These measurement systems are measures of potential communications output, not outcomes. They don’t report on what’s been achieved by the tweet or blog post, just how far it’s travelled and, potentially, how many people could have seen it.
3. Many of the most-used social media platforms – including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Google+ – operate as “walled gardens”, and no-one has access to even output data apart from the platforms owners themselves.

Several times in 2016 and 2017, Facebook has been forced to admit that it has overestimated how many people were exposed to ads and videos on its platform, and for how long. It has also been compelled to revise down potential audience reach because it has declared figures for – say – teens in the U.K. and U.S. that are higher than the total populations provided in census data.

The Power of English

When looking to prepare powerful, data-driven stories that are likely to drive engagement in a target audience, it is important to ensure that the content organisations prepare and distribute is fit for purpose. English is such a rich language with gloriously diverse ways of saying the same thing. In one form or another, English has been around for more than a millennium. In that time, many other languages – of conquerors and the conquered, of allies and foes – have left their trace. That’s why we have rusks and biscuits, crackers and cookies cheek-by-jowl in the same supermarket aisle.

You see, English – unlike rather too many of its native speakers on its home island these days – is an incredibly welcoming entity, willing to admit as many chambers as it does verandas, as happy with Schadenfreude as the Kindergarten. Mercifully there is no Academie Anglaise, and our linguistic open borders policy allows us to build narratives – tell tales – fabricate fables from the richest palate available to storytellers anywhere.

One benefit of this tolerance for tautology is that the able English speaker can deploy more forms of speech than those less linguistically well-endowed. And one of the simplest and most pleasing to the ear is alliteration: starting successive words with the same letter or sound, creating a rhythmic cadence to phrasing to make it more memorable. It’s not a bad starting point.

What’s more, research from the pre-digital age – particularly from the laboratories of Paul Ekman at the University of California at San Francisco, where he created a universal Atlas of Emotions – mean that we know that people pay more attention to information that ticks the following three boxes.

1. It’s emotional – it covers emotional subject areas and it triggers the emotions.
2. Connected to this, it needs to be energetic. Language – and, luckily for me and us, particularly the English language – is able to convey energy and excite, even on the printed page, even on the shimmering screen of a computer, a tablet, or a phone.
3. It’s empathetic – it considers the world from the point of view of those it’s trying to influence. It talks to the target audience in the language they understand and respond to.

Emotion

Data-driven stories that include an emotional element are actually remembered better than those stories that are purely factual. This is true of both positive and negative stories, both of which are more memorable than neutral, fact-based stories. This is because words and concepts that trigger an emotional response are of evolutionary value. Those things you could eat, mate with, or be killed by, deserve and command our attention, and should not be forgotten. What’s been dubbed the brain’s emotional barometer, an oval body called the amygdala (amygdala is the Greek for “almond”) lights up when we see, hear, talk about, or observe something pleasant or unpleasant.

The amygdala (actually, there are two of them; just drill in on either side from the eyes and ears and the amygdalae are at the meeting point) is an ancient structure. It’s the keystone of the limbic system – also known as the emotional brain – and is something we share with many other animal groups, including reptiles, birds, and, of course, other mammals. Emotional content is encoded more deeply, more richly through the involvement of the amygdala, and as a result is remembered better. Organisations would do well to remember this lesson from Psychology 101.

During the EU Referendum campaign, Vote Leave campaigner Michael Gove claimed, “people in this country have had enough of experts”. His contention was in response to the Remain campaign’s constant use of dry facts and data about what might or might not happen to the economy in the event that Britain left the EU.

In the aftermath of Vote Leave’s success, there has been a lot of debate about whether we have entered a “post-truth society”. The Guardian¹ reported on 19 September 2016: “The rush to believe that facts and evidence aren’t what people want is already streaming through policy and professional circles and influencing a rethink of how to communicate with the public.” This debate was redoubled after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, during which truth and facts apparently played a less important role than fake news. “Post-truth” was even the Oxford English Dictionary’s “word” of the year in 2016.²

The evidence suggests that it is not that facts are irrelevant, that we have not, indeed, entered a “post-truth society”. In fact, we live in an age when facts have never mattered more, as we’ll explore in Chapter 8. But what is also undeniable is that facts – data and statistics – need to be delivered with emotional relevance and resonance. Simply trying to change someone’s mind by (a) telling them they’re wrong and (b) showing them the facts that prove they’re wrong is counter-productive. In fact, using such a laboured, expository storytelling style is more likely to make them become further entrenched in contrary views. And as well as an emotional veneer, data-driven corporate and brand storytellers need a dose of intrigue to stimulate further interest.

The “post-truth society” is a particular nightmare vision for the scientific community, whose whole raison d’être is to underpinned by knowledge, facts, data, and statistics. In a rallying cry editorial written just after the referendum, New Scientist magazine wrote:³ “For reason to triumph, scientists need to learn to engage with emotion.”

Energy

English is a vibrant, living, ever-changing beast. All languages are, but English is particularly adaptable, capable of expressing energy through the types of words and phrases you choose to tell your data-driven story. It’s also supremely flexible. Has rules just waiting to broken. Smashed; crashed. Dashed against the rocks. Completeness comes from full sentences. But also from shards. Jagged outcrops.

What’s more, different types of words convey different states: verbs for action (think sports reporting), nouns for facts (an engineering manual), and adjectives for emotion (rousing poetry). And we’ve already set out above why emotion is so important in data-driven storytelling.

Too factual (the usual failing)? Cut down the noun count, particularly Latinate, abstract nouns.

Not enough action? More punchy, Germanic verbs please. Contrast the deathly dull “preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification” with the raw energy of “sweat, timeout, eureka, prove”. And how would you like a perfect first date to end? Would you rather osculate, kiss, or even snog? Same ideas, very different levels of engagement through emotion.

Content lacking in emotional appeal? Increase the number and intensity of adjectives. Two is too few, four is a list, but three has the potential to become a mind worm. Three adjectives like emotional, energetic, and empathetic, say.

Empathy

The Cocktail Party Rule states: “If you want to be boring, talk about yourself. But if you want to be interesting, talk about what matters to those who are listening.” Just consider those who draw an audience at a party, like bees round a honeypot. Are they talking about themselves? Almost never. They’re talking about a subject and in a manner that draws others in.

To achieve this with impact means thinking from others’ points of view before we start talking – before we start telling our data-driven stories. It means understanding how others will receive the information that’s transmitted, not just thinking about the elegance of transmission. And being able to do this is only possible to the mind readers among us – the truly empathetic. Well come back to the Cocktail Party Rule in Chapter 6.

We met the New York–based data storyteller, Ben Wellington, in Chapter 2. In addition to the helpful provision of public data sets by Mayor Bloomberg’s open data laws providing raw, Big Data sets for Wellington to work with, his skills as a data storyteller have benefitted hugely from his track record in improvisational theatre and comedy, or improv. As he explains in his TEDxBroadway talk, improv is all about telling stories better and connecting with people’s experiences through empathy.

The skilled improv performer doesn’t look to tell his or her own story; he or she looks to riff off what co-performers are doing and saying, and the best way to anticipate even a nonsense scene is to use empathy to understand the other characters. As Dan Pink shows in To Sell Is Human, great improv performers see every scene as an opportunity for empathetic, two-way dialogue. They see every line from another performer as an invitation. And this makes them approach their responses with an open attitude of “Yes, and …” rather than the closed and restricting “No, but…” Additionally, improv requires performers to focus on single ideas, keep scenes simple, and explore subject areas that performers know best. But above anything else, successful improv comes from empathy, which is also a core skill of the organisational storyteller.

In the case of organisations telling data-driven stories, looking to engage in dialogue with customers and consumers, empathy is a skill to be sought out, learned, and prized. Those organisations that fail to put themselves in the shoes of their audience, who can’t see – and tell – stories from their perspective, well, they’re suffering from what we might call corporate Asperger’s syndrome. Some are mildly on the spectrum and just a little mind-blind. They can learn shortcuts to overcome this condition. But others – often business-to-business, tech-first enterprises – can only see the world from their perspective and need fundamental rewiring if they’re ever to be thought of as engaging.

Engagement

The fundamental point of any storytelling, of any language you choose to use, is to interest and attract those you want to influence. In the always-on world of corporate and brand dialogue, this applies as much to companies as it always has to people. And organisations can learn to talk that elusive dialect of English – Human – if they follow the golden rules of storytelling.

If they wear their hearts on their sleeve and display their emotion.

If they keep up the pace and exhibit real energy.

If they put themselves in their audience’s shoes and reveal their empathy.

Do all of these things, and you’re very much more likely to secure that elusive fourth E: engagement.

Summing Up

The power of story has been known from the time of Aristotle onwards, and was first recommended to business leaders for more than a century in Dale Carnegie’s seminal The Art of Public Speaking.

Every organisation craves engagement from those it seeks to influence.

When people share content from an organisation, it’s a pretty good sign they want to draw others’ attention to that content.

When they comment favourably on content they share, it’s safe to assume they approve of what they’re sharing and the organisation. They’re already one of your advocates.

Sharing and liking are remarkably rare.

People pay more attention to content if it’s emotional (not – just – rational), if it’s energetic (not passive), and if it’s empathetic (not self-absorbed).

Emotional stories are more richly and deeply encoded in memory than facts alone. They trigger the brain’s emotional barometer, the amygdala.

Facts matter, but facts need to be placed in the context of human emotions.

English is particularly versatile in the way it can convey energy to meaning. Nouns deliver facts, verbs action, and adjectives emotion.

Organisations need to tell stories with the audience in mind. They need their empathy radar switched on and working.

Engagement is a consequence of emotion, energy, and empathy.

Give it a go: Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives

Go back to your organisation’s About Us page. Or, if you don’t work for an organisation, go to the About Us page of an organisation you admire. Capture the text into a Pages or Word file. Strip out all of the words apart from nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Then tally these up. Which comes out on top?

Mostly nouns, and the organisation values facts and information most highly.

Mostly verbs, and the organisation is a go-getter. (Though if they’re mostly in the passive voice “the shop was opened” rather than “we opened the shop” it’s not that go-getting).

And mostly adjectives, this is an organisation that wears its heart on its sleeve. It understands how to communicate emotion.

Does the relative count of nouns, verbs, and adjectives for the organ-isation in question meet your expectations of what it’s actually like? If not – and particularly if it’s your organisation – rewrite the About Us page to match either the reality or the desired perception, and share it with those who can bring about change.

Alternatively, get a group of people from your organisation together. Working in teams of four or five, generate three lists of 20–30 nouns, adjectives, and verbs that are truly distinctive to your organisation – why it exists, what it does, and how it does it.

Then, take it in turns to make sentences that describe the organisation using at least one of each. It’ll be like wading through treacle and feel unnatural at first. But after a few minutes of playing with your distinctive lexicon, it’ll feel good and empowering. And you’ll be surprised at how good it sounds – and consistently so.

Data-Driven Stories

Dear Person

What’s the organisation?

Spotify

What’s the brand?

Music streaming service

What’s the campaign?

Dear Person

What’s the story?

Develop locally tailored advertising in markets around the world based on the music Spotify knows its users have been streaming in particular countries, cities, or markets.

How did data drive the story?

The campaign could not have existed without the data, statistics, and analytics.

What was the outcome of the campaign?

Increase in empathy and understanding between users and Spotify. And a milestone achievement of passing 40m subscribers at the end of 2016.

Spotify is the Stockholm-headquartered music streaming system that has revolutionised people’s relationship with music around the world. Although music streaming systems existed before Spotify (most notably Napster) and although big players who are never first to market but often swoop in and clean up have since launched their own music streaming services (most notably Apple with its Apple Music platform), Spotify is the dominant player in the market, across multiple markets.

There are a number of reasons why Spotify has proven to be so successful. The company has been able to sign up the vast majority of record labels and artists whose music is in demand. They have made it simple and straightforward to no longer own physical copies of music but rather to pay to have access to digital copies, streaming seamlessly between devices. They provide different levels of membership, from free (with ads every 30 minutes), small monthly payment (on a handful of devices and streaming on only one at a time), and slightly larger monthly payment (multiple – family – users, streaming simultaneously). At every step of the way, Spotify has used its technology and data management to drive success.

In order to pay micro-royalties every time an artist’s music is streamed, Spotify knows who has streamed the music, where (geographically), on what type of device, at what time, and whether they’ve done so just once or repeatedly. Not only does this enable them to know how much they need to pay to licence and copyright holders of music, but it also enables them to make suggestions and recommendations, from new artists to user-created playlists, as well as offering special offers for concert tickets and meet-and-greets to committed fans who stream particular artists the most.

As a truly data-driven business, Spotify chose to use what it knows about its users’ streaming behaviour as the fuel for a global advertising campaign towards the end of 2016. Without seeing the creative executions, in principle this campaign sounds dull and dry – just a data-driven communications campaign that reflects back to users what they’ve been doing.

In reality, the delivery of Spotify’s “Dear Person” campaign follows the principles of the 4Es of storytelling. To drive user engagement – and also, without doubt, to trigger subscribers to reach for phones and tablets and stream some more – the witty executions play on emotion, use real energy, and display deep empathy.

Campaign posters, which ran from November 2016, first in the U.K., France, Germany, and the U.S., and then in ten more countries, included the headlines:

“Dear person who played Sorry 42 times on Valentine’s Day. What did you do?”

“Dear 3,749 people who streamed It’s The End of the World As We Know It the day of the Brexit vote. Hang in there.”

Figure 4.1 Spotify Brexit advert

“Dear person who made a playlist called: ‘One Night Stand With Jeb Bush Like He’s a Bond Girl in a European Casino.’ We have so many questions.”

• Emotion – Different executions in the campaign referenced individual, city-wide, and country-wide moments of emotion, distress, unhappiness, and joy, which they addressed by listening to just the right music.
• Energy – Visually, the campaign crackled with energy. From its use of a very un-corporate electric pink and clashing red to iconic images. But also verbally, too, in its encouragement to its users to “Hang in there”. Not to mention the campaign’s strapline: “Thanks 2016. It’s been weird.”
• Empathy – The whole campaign is about Spotify showing that it understands what its customers are doing and thinking. By knowing which music they’re playing at particular moments – on Valentine’s Day, on the day of the Brexit vote, and so on – and drawing associations between what was streamed when, the company is showing deep empathy for its customers. After all, the campaign is called “Dear Person”, and it doesn’t get much more empathetic than that.

Tech Times⁴ reported that the idea for the data-driven advertising campaign originated from Spotify’s end-of-year, “The Year in Music campaign” in 2015, which showed that user data contained some interesting titbits and insights. According to chief marketing officer Seth Farbman: “That led to the idea of reflecting culture via listener behavior, showing that big data is not depriving marketing of creativity as some have implied. For us, data inspires and gives an insight into the emotion that people are expressing.” Tech Times dubbed the campaign “the fun side of customer data analytics”, and it’s certainly that. But it’s also a compelling example of data-driven storytelling at its very best.

Key takeaway: The data you collect from your customers can be repurposed to tell data-driven stories that drive engagement through emotion, energy, and empathy.