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c h a p t e r 8 : ╇ E ngagement on the S ocial W eb╇ ■that spied that lure told three others, “Hey, you’ve got to check this out.” That’s what
you want on the Social Web, too.

Engagement as a Business Activity

Customer engagement is the prerequisite for advocacy. Mentally jump back to the
engagement process defined in the opening chapters: Starting with content consump-
tion, and then proceeding through curation, creation, and collaboration, there is a
stepping-off point—collaboration—that connects trial, purchase, and advocacy into
the engagement process. That leads to the choice of collaboration as the new bench-
mark for engagement: When your customers or constituents are collaborating with
each other and sharing the results of those efforts with other participants, then they are
engaged in your business or organization.

Combining this definition of engagement and the benchmark of collaboration
with the larger engagement process leads to a powerful end result: the development
212 of customer advocates. Tangible results—the emergence of customer advocates, for
example—become measurable end goals of the social business. In the next section,
customer-led advocacy (or stakeholder-led, for governmental services and NGOs, non-
profit organizations and similar) will be tied to the business objectives and business
fundamentals that punctuate a quantitative management process.

Create Advocates Through Engagement

Having established the path from consumption—think traditional media and “tra-
ditional-media-like” activities in a digital context (banner ads or video pre-rolls, for
example)—to collaboration and advocacy as a sort of process template or design guide
for your social business engagement programs, the next step is connecting the resulting
expressions of advocacy to your business.

Recall Fred Reichheld and the Net Promoter Score: A base of customers or con-
stituents that are highly likely to strongly recommend a brand, product, or service is
a fundamental condition for driving long-term profits and sustained growth. This is
precisely what advocacy is all about: Advocates will readily and favorably recommend
brands, products, services, and causes; which in turn leads to a competitive advantage
by reducing expenditures required to overcome a lack of referrals or worse (detractors,
for example). Offering price breaks, discounts, rebates, or similar concessions intended
to offset inferior quality inevitably eats away at margins. Over the long term, any
unnecessary expense and the associated deterioration of margins will obviously hurt
the business or organization.

What is perhaps less clear—though equally valid—is that sustainable higher
profit margins—think Whole Foods versus the other food stores against which it com-
petes even if not directly—lead to enhanced opportunities to innovate, to the ability to
attract and retain higher quality employees, to support higher quality suppliers, to use