Page 243 - Social Media Marketing

Extend Engagement 221

The prior sections covered engagement, first as a customer activity and then by its ■ ╇ E xtend E ngagement
counterpart, engagement as a business activity. From the customer’s perspective,
engagement is all about the simple act of spending time in activities that are relevant,
of interest, or otherwise satisfy a purpose or desire. This may or may not include your
branded microsite or online game or what have you. Truth be told, as engagement is
defined in the social business context it probably does not. This is not to say that these
elements aren’t useful as a part of an overall marketing campaign, but rather to say
that they are less effective as social media components when compared with elements
that are centered around interest in a lifestyle, passion, or cause.

The tendency or behavior to associate around passions, lifestyles, causes, and
similar personally relevant activities is what underlies the recommended approach to
participating in a community as a business. Look for community anchors that are
centered on a passion, a lifestyle, or a cause and use them as the basis for your social
technology efforts. Around these one can then add and connect to the brand outposts
in places like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and similar sites.

Extending engagement as a business tool requires a different set of actions than
engagement as a marketing concept. From the perspective of your business, engagement
looks a bit different: It’s still centered on passions, lifestyles, and causes but the goal is
collaboration, expressed as learning or a suggestion that leads to innovation or similar
business benefit. The challenge facing the marketing team—and by extension the other
functions that support the overall customer or member experience—is in converting
the energy of customer or stakeholder passion, for example, into energy that produces
a business benefit.

This conversion of passion into a business benefit might occur between custom-
ers—for example, when a customer who becomes an evangelist emerges as a true advo-
cate for your brand, product, or service. Or, it may occur between a customer and an
employee when a customer service agent discovers a passionate customer with a specific
suggestion or viewpoint. In the past, an invitation may have been extended to such a
customer to join a customer advisory board. While that may still be a good practice,
why not ask this person to lead a discussion or support forum, or enroll this person in
a research community? One caveat applies: Whenever you create a community that has
a defined starting and stopping point—generally the case with purpose-driven research
communities—be sure that this is communicated to participants in advance.

Collaboration

Research communities are one of the ways that you can begin to engage customers
and constituents in a collaborative process. Because participants know that they are
engaged in a research and learning effort, they are already in the mode of sharing what
they think with you. Unlike focus groups—typically one-off events, too often with but