For those of you who might have been following the Forrester Research Marketing Forum 2008 (either via "microblogging" or Twitter), a new set of metrics were put forth to better quantify how consumers engage with products and services.
The engagement model is based on Discovery, Evaluation, Use and Affinity for products and can be used offline and online to measure the interaction that consumers have with brands. It's based on a study Forrester released back in August:
Executive Summary: The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers' trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach. We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each of these is built from data collected from online and offline data sources. Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers' actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.
Their framework outlines four "I" concepts:
- Involvement tracks site visitors, time spent, page views and more (old-school stuff)
- Interaction measures the contributions to blogs, photo and video creation and uploads, and purchases
- Intimacy tries to understand consumer attitudes, perception, and feelings about a brand through surveys or monitoring technology as well as applications providing an interactive environment between brand and consumers
- Influence measures the likelihood that consumers will recommend or advocate products or brands
What's interesting is that we have been using "engagement" as a primary metric used to measure the success our programs since back in 2003 - while our methodologies have evolved, the principles remain the same. Nice to see our friends at Forrester finally pick up on and validate it (just kidding, we love you Forrester folks! 
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1 FreshNetworks Blog » Blog Archive » Engagement - your new key metric // Apr 11, 2008 at 5:22 am
[...] Thanks to Social Media Playground for a post this week about the Forrester Research Marketing Forum 2008, and in particular the discussion about engagement being the new key metric for businesses to know and understand (see post here). [...]
2 Medical Practice Marketing // Oct 8, 2008 at 12:25 am
I would love a link to your previous ideas about “engagement” as I am writing an article coming at this from my own point-of-view.
We specialize in medical marketing of physician services.
As doctors and physicians are extremely concerned with engagement due to ethical and licensing issues, among others, our efforts to make their websites fulfill all of your engagement criteria might be scrutinized for instruction on just how to do it properly.
Let us go through your points from a medical marketing point-of-view and see how your assumption is truly correct:
Involvement: a medical site has to be relevant to the needs felt by the potential patient. Thus, a rich website in terms of detailed coverage and simple navigation is the key to involving a patient.
Interaction: we strive to make each page a “committer” page. By this, I mean that we allow on each page for the patient to give up something and, thus, become part of our doctor's network. Newsletters, appointment settings, comments, etc. fulfill this need.
Intimacy: the intimacy issue is difficult for doctors due to HIPAA laws, but still a blog with comments, a private sign-in area allowing more in-depth knowledge, and the such can be helpful.
Influence: each doctor should strive to add as much meaningful content on the web as possible and get that content linking back to her, or his, site. Additionally, publication of the same material on the doctor's site is meaningful. Google PageRank can be instructive on this issue though, sadly, few people outside the internet seo business know how to use it to gauge a site's value in Google's eyes.
By Brian Haven, from Forrester Research, on “Engagement”, “The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers' trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach. We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each of these is built from data collected from online and offline data sources. Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers' actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.”
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4 YEO - Numbers That Mean Something // Apr 25, 2009 at 6:51 pm
[...] the numbers that really matter are related to engagement. Forester proposed a four “I” concept for measuring [...]
5 contextual inquiries // May 17, 2009 at 7:15 am
Brilliant. Those four “I's” are really promising. Match them with the four “P's” of marketing and you have yourself a concrete plan.
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