Measuring the Return on Engagement

As the nature of our business, custom publishing, changes -- we have to recognize that the education we provide our clients also needs to be shared internally as well. For the last 4 weeks or so, the Digital Media team in our company has been giving 30-45 minute talks each Monday about the very basics of what we do. And we're only halfway through our schedule of conversations.

Yesterday I introduced metrics and how, as a company, we can be more agile to respond to user needs. Here are the slides from that presentation (It's not my most creative presentation, usually I load up the slides with photos of kitties from Flickr...):

Click through for my thoughts about the presentation AND our adoption of an internal social network.

You'll see a few references to "iSpace" in the presentation. iSpace is what we call our internal social network -- so far it has been an amazing success. Everyone is extremely happy with the system and they're using it in so many ways that I didn't immediately foresee -- sharing photos of company events, discussing internal processes, sharing resources across silos, and really communicating methods for improving almost every aspect of what we do. This one tool has gone a long way to solve many of the communication barriers in the company and the dialogue it has spurred has been incredibly authentic and legitimate.

Before the presentation, I created a forum topic on metrics and asked everyone to let me know what they wanted to learn more about -- I certainly didn't want to stand in front of everyone and consume 30 minutes of their time without some sort of permission involved.

Just to sum up my responses to the last slide ...

1) The most important metrics are always driven by the business objectives of the account. While you shouldn't view any one metric alone, there are specific conversions we can consider priorities for each individual account.

2) What should we be driving our clients to care about? Well, it's definitely not purely eyeballs on their site -- I can throw up naked photos of celebrities to bring eyeballs, but that's not in line with business objectives of a client like Mastercard of Lowe's. As we move to focus on engagement, and longer relationships with our clients, it's more about attracting and rewarding the right kind of eyeballs, the one's stuck in the heads of those born to be evangelists.

3) Benchmarks -- I actually blurted out "I don't believe much in benchmarks" -- and thankfully I was corrected by our SVP -- internal benchmarks are a must. Comparing a single site to some type of "industry standard" is suspect at best however. We should be manipulating our sites as often as we can to determine the optimal experience and conversion rate for our users and our offering -- and then working like hell to beat it.

4) And the last point goes to answer "How do we improve stagnant metrics?" -- Stagnant?? That word should never describe anything online -- not when we work in such a malleable medium. We should be able to learn something new with every iteration, every metric that can propel the user experience and the ROI of a site. (and yes, they go hand in hand)

5) "How can we better utilize ROI to make the case for an online publication?" -- At Imagination, we believe our commitment to ROI differentiates us from all other custom publishers and creative agencies. But there's always more that we can do. We should move ROI to the forefront of all of our discussions. We often have clients come to us with statements like "I know we need a website, because we don't have one" or "because our current site is old" -- but it's within our responsibility to probe the business objectives of any new project and determine realistic ROI goals for both the short and long term. In almost all cases, an online publication is only one solution to the problem -- and the user base and business objectives should drive the decision making process.

I'll share one more thought...

Because we have chosen to differentiate ourselves by a commitment to ROI -- it means that we are forced into a much longer and more engaged relationship with our clients and our projects. In the agency world, we've grown so accustomed to hand-offs, but they are a disservice to our clients and to our work. Like any other custom publisher, we create media for our clients, but our relationship only begins there.

Comments

[Don Lipper]

You've hit the nail on the head. You've got to have strong metrics with any custom content effort.
Don Lipper
www.CustomPublishingNews.com