The Engagement Obsession (I’m not talking about rings here)

Why are we so obsessed with engagement online?

Because we can be.

My experience has been mostly with news organizations, but I’m sure this is the case with many other businesses. We analyze the number of visitors, the length of their visit, the number of pages and links clicked, the number of people commenting, the number of people retweeting and any other number of “engagement” measurements.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Unless it’s used as an excuse.

From David Armano.

Example: Why should I invest precious time and resources into Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) when the number of users on that site is small? Isn’t there only a small reward?

I wasn’t in newsrooms when the Internet was the next big thing, but I’m guessing the fact that “not many people are using that darned Internet thing yet” was a frequent justification for doing nothing to address it.

No, not everyone needs to be tweeting or friending away. There are plenty of reasons not to. But not trying something because it lacks overwhelming audience engagement just seems like a cop-out. As information providers, shouldn’t we be ahead of the curve? And then, I begin to question the original premise.

How did we previously measure engagement? Before the Internet. Before Google Analytics. We looked at newspaper subscription and sales numbers. Did you care if your readers wrote letters to the editor? Did you monitor how many people mentioned articles to their friends? All you really knew was that the paper landed on the driveway. Who knows if it was even read. Did we ever question or fret about engagement? No. Because subscription payments came in and advertisers paid for the opportunity of exposure — not for a guaranteed number of viewers or clicks.

We’ve established a system online (when it comes to the $$) that relies on users interacting with our content and each other on a different level. One they haven’t been conditioned to. For decades, we’ve demanded those users be passive consumers. We wanted them to buy and read, and if they wanted to write a letter now and again we would humor them. But they weren’t allowed any real stake. So don’t throw your hands up and say “but they just aren’t interacting with us online!” You (the institution) probably helped create the problem. Can’t do anything about that except attempt to change it. Excuses don’t = change.

So back to the original issue. No, you can’t expect your Twitter followers to equal the number of households tuning in to your 10 PM newscast. But those viewers are slowly being reprogrammed.

My generation largely lives online. We participate and collaborate frequently thanks to easy tools like Flickr and YouTube. We, and those after us, will adapt more and more tools like these (and Twitter and Facebook) and you WILL have to be there in order to interact with us.

So if you are questioning devoting resources to auxiliary online efforts, I’d ask you to be a little more forward looking. Is this commitment today so financially damaging that the potential future good is irrelevant? If the effort were to fail, if Twitter disappeared, would you really lose so much investment that any gain would be mitigated? Otherwise, I see few excuses not to at least give it a try.

Additional note: If anyone knows of good data on social networking “engagement” metrics, I’d love to see it. This post is a direct result of a lot of questions from news folks about how many viewers are on social networking sites, the degree to which they use them and whether or not they’d like to interact with a news organization on them. I, obviously, have my thoughts but would love to have some data!

Experimenting with paid content: a semantics problem

Al Tompkins ran part of an interview with Belo VP James Moroney III and highlighted one section in particular where the exec said:

Two years ago, I would have told you that asking people to pay for content on the Web is a ridiculous notion. Today, I will tell you it’s almost imperative we experiment with it to see what the consumer will respond to.

Aren’t we past the stage of experimenting? Didn’t almost every newspaper try paid content at some point? Aside from my beliefs about the possibilities of paying for articles, archives and what-not, this makes it sound like the idea is brand new. Oh gosh, why didn’t we think of that before?

And I truly wish the reporter would’ve pressed the issue a bit more. Do lawsuits like the one GateHouse recently settled become legitimate? If any content from behind a pay wall is quoted in a free space, that would seem to me that monetary damages and a legal cause would follow. What would that do to information on the internet? How would the link economy be affected if users followed links only to be told they had to register and pay?

Don’t get me wrong, my passion for journalism will mean NOTHING if it can’t be monetarily supported. I don’t want to work for peanuts (or free) either.  But this seems to be an old-school idea to me. Maybe Kindle is working because it’s a significantly different format. Maybe we should try to think outside the scope of current operations to find a sustainable solution.

Listen to the high school kids

One of the local newspapers is restructuring. (The other one isn’t doing so hot either, but I haven’t seen many public statements about changes.) I’m still puzzled about why this is a big deal. Ford isn’t producing the same cars they did twenty years ago; why should newspapers be beholden to a centuries-old, dead-tree model? Even the high schoolers can tell you what’s up.  Two high school students are getting ready to tell their principals:

1. The Web has won.

2. Learning communities have no boundaries.

3. Educators need to focus more on how to improve rather than restrict student access to the Internet.

A few minor changes and it could be the perfect message to the newsprint holdouts.

The Web has won. And bonus: we can still make money there! The Web is becoming another apendange for most people, particularly those in my generation. To have ANY hope we have to reach out on the preferred platform.

News has no boundaries. Things that happen halfway around the world can be intersting to people here in Iowa. News can break on social networks, in the comments, through pictures, and news cycles have entirely different lives given the available technology. We have to start living it 24 hours a day. No holding stories for the 5 p.m. or the next day’s edition. Your readers will get the news somewhere else if you aren’t providing it for them.

Publishers and managers need to focus on getting past the basics. Settling for a limiting CMS, sticking by text-only repeats from the paper/broadcast and generally playing it safe while not investing won’t fly anymore. It’s not enough to say, “yeah! we have a Web site!” The possibilities online are endless (to use the cliche) and if all you are giving me is text and video or audio that can’t be embedded in the article text, you are sending me the signal that you are so half-assed that I don’t need to waste my time.

Of course, I could preach on about all these things in terms of corporations as well. Maybe for another day.