Editor's note: Clarke De Pastino is vice president of engagement for Ipsos SMX.
We are living in an age of technological revolution caused by the rapid and widespread adoption of online technologies and the active participation of virtually all members of the public in social media. Companies today understand that the effective integration of technology and social media in their research and marketing is critical to their ability to compete in the marketplace. Indeed, customers expect to be engaged by brands through a variety of media and devices. Companies therefore need to know how to harness the power of those mediums to best engage with their customers, whether they are interacting with their customers on social media or as part of an online marketing research community.
Engagement is such a hot topic that Mashable listed it among the “30 overused buzzwords in digital marketing.” Ad Age and Google recently issued a joint report on brand engagement, stating that 90.8 percent of Generation C consumers regularly engage with brands online. In a recent Forrester Research report, David M. Cooperstein wrote “The only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers.” What is missing in the dialogue is a clear and simple idea of what engagement means in this new world order.
If you Google “engagement” you’ll find definitions from several sources that touch on the truth at the heart of engagement but none of those definitions are particularly helpful when crafting an engagement strategy. Understanding engagement merely means understanding the hallmarks of basic human interaction and collective behavior – in this case, of like-minded members of online communities. If you want to engage customers, you need to use the universal skills required for positive and effective social interaction.
Throughout recorded history, cultures around the world have instructed children to obey the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is a universal ethic and a default moral position for all cultures because it requires people to actively think about others, to try to imagine how they think and feel and to use that information in all aspects of social interaction. In other words, the Golden Rule requires us to empathize with others, including those who may be very different from us, to understand, respect and ultimately meet their expectations.
The best practices for engagement are derived from the basic sociological truism embodied in the Golden Rule. Adherence to that fundamental code allows us to creatively engage with people, even though their wants and needs may not be identical to our own.
We therefore call the best practices for engagement the “10 golden rules of engagement.” Our team has developed these rules after more than 15 years of experience working with clients and their community members. These rules are the foundation for engaging with people online. To some, these rules are obvious; to others, they may be counterintuitive. And, standing alone, they are arguably not unique or innovative. But when consistently applied together, they become a platform for innovation and creativity from which the opportunities to launch tactics to drive participation in research or marketing and enhance brand affinity are limitless.
Golden Rule #1: Demonstrate and deliver value
Successfully motivating customer engagement requires you to appeal to the customer’s self-interest. Accordingly, in the very first moment of interaction with them, you must make a promise that you have something of value to offer them and deliver on that promise.
Creating that promise starts with an exercise in empathy, asking oneself: “If I were a research community member what could this message offer me that would make me want to open it, read this copy, click this link and participate?” It’s easy to define the value of members participating for the brand but your members need to be intrinsically motivated. To make a successful value proposition, you must understand why your customers would want to interact with your brand and appeal to what’s in it for them. You don’t need to promise a tangible or financial incentive or engage in obvious salesmanship. Indeed, as discussed below, intangibles can be strong motivators. The promise can be as subtle as funny content, exclusive information or a prize. Once you’ve defined the value proposition, you must deliver, because all people, particularly in the customer service context, expect it of you and will not necessarily forgive a failure. You will lose members quickly, and once you’ve lost them, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to get them back.
Golden Rule #2: Build relationships
We are living in the Participation Age, in which more than 2 billion consumers interact in online venues daily. You are competing for their attention. To be one of the ones that reaches them, the Golden Rule teaches us that you must let them know that you value them enough to invest the time and energy to build a relationship. The goal is not merely to get their attention. The hallmark of a strong relationship is connection and investment in the bond. By developing a relationship with community members, you are instilling in them a vested interest in the brand. Hill Holliday and Lippincott in their recent paper “Welcome to the Human Era” surmised that “customer insight yields more intimate relationships, which in turn accelerates additional insight. Across industries, we see this leading to higher profitability, deeper share-of-wallet relationships and stronger market values.” Given that fact, it’s not surprising that savvy executives like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “see [. . .] customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts.” Marc Pritchard, the chief marketing officer for Procter & Gamble, shares a similarly ambitious vision “to build 1:1 relationships in real-time with every person in the world!”
Gone are the days of brands pushing out messages and conducting focus groups behind two-way mirrors. Technology and social media have created an expectation in today’s customers that brands will engage in a personalized and nearly instantaneously responsive one-on-one, two-way dialogue to share ideas and experiences. The face of the brand – the research community manager – must therefore foster real relationships with customers by personalizing interactions with community members. Developing meaningful and strong relationships, as always, is a two-way street. Community managers must therefore be willing to connect with the members by 1) sharing real information about themselves, such as first names, photos and short videos; and (2) respectfully asking questions of community members that the community manager would be willing to answer, listening to the member’s answers and replying, because that’s what’s expected in any relationship. The discourse should be natural and relaxed like that between friends. You wouldn’t give a friend the hard sell – using multiple adjectives and exclamation points. Learn to communicate genuine excitement to community members without overdoing it because unbridled enthusiasm doesn’t ring true. Ultimately, if you successfully build relationships with community members, the members will continue to engage because they enjoy the interaction and feel invested in the brand.
Golden Rule #3: Be transparent
Respect, which all people expect and deserve, requires transparency. Anything less in this Participation Age unduly risks a negative and potentially lasting backlash. Once you have established a relationship with your members, you must be honest about what you are asking them to do and why and how that action meets the value proposition in Golden Rule #1. A classic qualitative research question might ask you to “share a story of someone that influenced you when buying a new car.” That approach is not effective in engaging community members. Instead, the request should be framed this way: “Our marketing department is working on a new commercial about the people that influence your purchasing decisions. Please share a story about someone that influenced you when you were buying a new car.” Adding details in the interest of transparency changes the tone of the conversation to one that is more conducive to building a respectful relationship. As noted in Golden Rule #2, building a relationship based on mutual respect and trust is critical to extracting the valuable insights that drive profitability.
Golden Rule #4: Involve the brand
It’s not enough to have a branded Facebook or Twitter page. Once you go branded, you have to go all in. Customers today assume that every brand does this already. They are judging your brand on how well you do it. To stand out and effectively use the brand, there must be top-down buy-in from company executives. Customers truly appreciate access to executives, who are usually absent from direct customer interactions. Challenge executives to get involved by hosting live chats and blogging and tweeting with consumers. Remember a conversation is a two-way proposition. It’s not enough to just tweet; executives need to engage by asking questions, listening and replying, which will generate customer insight. As with opportunities created by mobile, technological advancement has allowed for purely text-based responses from members to evolve into the sharing images and videos, which creates new platforms for creativity and new opportunities to bring the community experience to life.
Golden Rule #5: Show impact
Reporting back to research community members the value of their participation is a universal best practice of community management because it is an expression of gratitude and a demonstration that you have been listening and not wasting your members’ time. All people like to know that they are valued and are contributing. Reporting back to members means letting them know what insights you’ve learned or gained from their contributions. Certainly, you have filled out a survey or answered a questionnaire and wondered what became of the data you provided. In communities, we have the opportunity to generate member goodwill by letting them know. You need not produce a formal research summary or matrix for their review. A thank-you note format is enough. And if the statement comes from a brand executive, you are simultaneously applying Golden Rules 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Golden Rule #6: Recognize and reward
Intangible recognition and reward are critical to fostering intrinsic motivation among your audience. By recognizing individual contributions, you are again creating a more vested experience in your community. In essence, you are exploiting our human need for time in the spotlight. Make your members famous in your community by featuring quotations from their communications and their contributions. Always give them credit. Rewards are also a powerful tool to engage a larger group of members. Consider creating a mixture of contests and sweepstakes to continuously drive participation across different initiatives and objectives. After you hand out rewards, remember to recognize the people who won! In addition, be sure to harness available technology by utilizing gaming mechanics to encourage participation through badges, points and access.
Golden Rule #7: Be entertaining
While probably the most obvious of rules, this is also where many brands fall short. People want to be entertained with interesting content. To create engaging content, a community manager wears a lot of hats, among those being copywriter, photographer, videographer and curator. The first step is to determine what your brand voice is online, which might differ from your brand’s personality offline. Once determined, use media to make your posts stand out. According to a recent report by SocialBakers that tracked 5,000 brand pages on Facebook, photos made up 93 percent of the most engaging content. To create engaging content, you must also embrace and foster co-creation. Our own research at Ipsos shows that 44 percent of social media users under age 35 post questions, ideas and photos on brand pages.
Golden Rule #8: Communicate regularly
People can have short attention spans, need direction and like the security of a consistent plan. A strong, consistent call to action is therefore essential to drive interest and participation. Community managers should determine a cadence so that members can anticipate when to expect something new. Communication with members should be short and clearly define expectations when there is a desired action. While this has long been a best practice of e-mail marketing, a recent study by Buffer concluded that online posts below 250 characters can get you 60 percent more engagement and posts under 80 characters garnered 66 percent more engagement.
Shorter is also better because more and more members are engaging through their mobile devices – a venue in which less is more. Catering to mobile also gives you more opportunities to communicate regularly with your members, even when they are on the go, improving response rates. The vice president of global insight for General Mills recently recognized the power of mobile to allow for regular and meaningful communication, stating in an interview with Forbes that General Mills has “placed a significant bet on mobile research” and is “now conduct[ing] well over half of [its] research on mobile devices” because “mobile research allows us to ask questions where and when we want to” and “provides the consumer with options in terms of how they communicate back to us. If they can’t put it into words, they can take a picture or a video and send it instead.”
Golden Rule #9: Refresh your member base
Do not let the number of your members lull you into a false sense of security and confidence. The existence of a thousand followers doesn’t mean that they are actively engaged. Members who are not actively engaged have little to no value. You should always be recruiting new members by promoting your community and social channels in venues where you are likely to attract new followers through online and offline promotions, e-mail newsletters and other customer-facing initiatives. If your objective is having members perform a desired action, then you should be comfortable with your member base being in a constant cycle of natural attrition and proactive replenishment. Not to mention, you can increase involvement by creating the impression that the community itself or at least specific content is exclusively available to active participants (see Golden Rule #6).
Golden Rule #10: Moderate closely
In Rule 5 we discussed the importance of listening and providing feedback. There is nothing worse than a negative post that goes unanswered, or a missed opportunity to probe and learn more. Community managers need to read every post and take the time to respond frequently. Responses should always be courteous and empathetic regardless of if it is an apology, redirecting to the appropriate channels, probing for deeper insights or simply thanking them for their time. In addition, moderators should ensure that members are protected from each other’s abuse.
Guided by empathy
Those are the 10 Golden Rules of engagement. Use them creatively, apply them consistently. While the ever-changing technological landscape requires companies to use creativity and innovation in their interactions with consumers, the rules demand that we always be guided by empathy. In other words, engage your research community members and customers the way you would want to be engaged.
REFERENCES
Al-Greene, Bob. “30 overused buzzwords in digital marketing,” Mashable. May 23, 2013. Available at: http://mashable.com/2013/05/23/buzzword-infographic/
Ad Age Content Strategy Studio, Brand Engagement in the Participation Age Research Study, Google Think Insights (February 2014). Available at: www.thinkwithgoogle.com/research-studies/brand-engagement-in-participation-age.html
Cooperstein, David et al. “Competitive strategy in the age of the customer: only customer-obsessed enterprises can survive disruption,” Forrester. October 10, 2013. Available at: www.forrester.com/Competitive+Strategy+In+The+Age+Of+The+Customer/fulltext/-/E-RES59159?objectid=RES59159
Defining Engagement Initiative, Advertising Research Foundation. Available at: http://thearf.org/research-arf-initiatives-defining-engagement
Marshall, John & Ritchie, Graham. “Welcome to the human era.” Lippincott and Hill Holliday (2013). Available at: www.humanerabrands.com/welcome-to-the-human-era.pdf
“Photos make up 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook.” Socialbakers.com. July 22, 2013. Available at: www.socialbakers.com/blog/1749-photos-make-up-93-of-the-most-engaging-posts-on-facebook
“Content that creates content.” Ipsos Socialogue. February 5, 2013. Available at: www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/socialogue/and www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=5984
Cooper, Belle Beth. “7 powerful Facebook statistics you should know for a more engaging Facebook page.” Buffer. July 23, 2013. Available at: http://blog.bufferapp.com/7-facebook-stats-you-should-know-for-a-more-engaging-page
Olenski, Steve. “A Fortune 500 brand and the ever changing role of consumer insights.” Forbes. February 21, 2014. Available at: a-fortune-500-brand-and-the-ever-changing-role-of-consumer-insights/