An Exponential Guide to Digital Engagement
At the heart of all digital engagement lies the deep study and observation of human behaviour mixed with a rigorous approach to data and measurement.
‘If I could see further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’ — Isaac Newton
Throughout my career I have focussed on one core question… How can we use digital to make a genuine impact on people’s lives and careers? Eventually, my journey anchored on the challenge of online learning and in particular the challenge of digital engagement within the education space.
Before diving into my reflections on digital engagement I first want to acknowledge the major inspirations behind my work. In today’s digital age, it doesn’t make sense to lock yourself away and create all your own content from scratch. Instead, we must first strive to learn from the ‘leaders’ or ‘masters’ in our field, and then build on their expertise.
These are a few of the sources that have inspired by work…
Mind Valley — thanks Vishen
Live your Legend — thanks Scott
Mixergy — thanks Andrew
FeverBee — thanks Richard
The Muse — thanks Kathryn
Tim Ferris — thanks Tim
Brain Pickings — thanks Maria
The Marketoonist — thanks Tom
Seth Godin — thanks Seth
The School in the Cloud / SOLE — thanks Sugatra Mitra
Right, let’s dive in…
An Introduction to mastering the art of digital engagement
Often we make the mistake of thinking of digital engagement as being something separate from real world engagement. The focus shifts towards monitoring conversion rates and advertising spend rather than building authentic relationships and providing a unqiue and human service. In reality the digital world is just an extension of our physical realities. Technology doesn’t transform human nature, it amplifies it. Therefore, if we want to drive digital engagement, we must first observe very carefully how people behave in real life.
My research has led me to the conclusion that ‘the exchange of value’ is at the heart of all human interraction. Value exchange is a complex, multi-layered and multi-dimensional phenomenon, which goes beyond the transactions of time and money into the realms of mastery, influence, connection, experience, emotion, friendship and reputation. Therefore, understanding the complex value flows and motivations that occur within your community is essential in sparking digital engagement and keeping your 1000 true fans coming back for more.
This is also where social media plays a massive role. Social media has made ‘word of mouth’ marketing instantaneous, global and most importantly… free. However, the downside is that it has never been more difficult to catch and keep hold of people’s attention. There is a great video of Steve Job’s talking about marketing where he states ‘We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember very much about us’. To hold people’s attention ‘we need to be very clear on what we want people to know about us’.
More and more digital marketers are beginning to realise that the best way to increase engagement is to figure out how to add insane amounts of value (in the form of entertainment or expertise) to early adopters and influencers in their target niche.
This is why when I think of digital engagement, I like to use the analogy of hospitality and fine dining. All restaurants serve food and drink, just as all websites serve us with pages of content, but it is in the small details and gestures where the difference is made. Danny Meyer captures this beautifully in his book Setting the Table. In the end, the magic is always in the detail.
The most successful online communities keep the technology simple and focus on reaching out and connecting with their audience.”
Below are some useful guidelines that I like to follow when it comes to curating, launching and managing an online community.
Invest significant time in developing rich one-to-one dialogues with your founding members. Try to define moments of impact and contribution that you can make.
A great question to ask is ‘What are the day to day challenges and needs of our core audience and how can we provide them with meaningful support when it really counts?’
Another approach is to ask the question, ‘How can we delite our founding members with unexpected small gestures of value?’
Just the simple act of inviting a new member for a short Skype conversation to discuss a shared topic of interest could forge a strong bond and give you invaluable feedback and insight.
When it comes to the technology part of digital engagement it is easy to fall into the trap of the feature overload ‘built it and they will come’ mindset. In practice, if you are launching a new community platform, less is much much more. Here are some of the design principles that guide my work.
Start with something specific. On your homepage communicate the immediate value that you can provide to a new member (e.g. access to content, events, networks, etc) and have a simple call to action button.
Provide context. Then (as the visitor scrolls down) tell your story and summarise the long term purpose and core values of your community.
Get in touch. Make sure at any point visitors to you site can easily contact you directly to ask a question or suggest an idea.
Sign up. Make it easy for you members to signup / login / invite friends and colleagues.
Prioritize quality. Make sure the first thing that members see when they sign up has a WOW factor, showcasing high quality content that they cannot find anywhere else. First impressions count.
It is always better to send 10 remarkable messages to 10 influencial members than to blast a generic newsletter to thousands of your contacts via Mailchimp. Never under-estimate the power of the personal touch.
User generated content. Make it easy for members to create, discover and share their own content pages, but makes sure you have a moderation layer.
Peer-to-peer messaging. Make it easy for members to send direct messages to each other.
Search that works. Make it easy for members to search and find content quickly.
Educational content. If you are curating educational content try to think beyond the course paradigm. Here is an article that dives into this concept in more detail.
Co-creation. If possible aim to co-create content with your users.
Design matters. Having an engaging and entertaining image at the top of your content page makes a difference.
Video & Audio. Some people hate to read. They prefer to listen and watch. A multi-media approach to content is the way to go.
Engagement sparks. Insert call to actions, quotes and reflection question throughout your articles.
Content Selection. Each community is different and therefore you need to carefully consider which type of content is most relevant. Here is a list…
- Inspirations (videos, podcasts, ideas, market insights, trends, infographics, short blogs)
- Tools (masterclasses, in depth resources, case studies, interviews)
- Discussions (groups, topics)
- Directory (companies, organisations, contacts, points on a map)
- Events (conferences, dinners, meetups & webinars)
- Campaigns (crowdfunding and activism)
- Challenges (open innovation crowdsourcing)
- Deals (group savings)
- Projects (freelance, voluntary)
- Jobs (time sensitive, part time, full time, contract)
- Products (transactional, e-commerce)
Each content type has it’s own strengths and weaknesses. Some content types (e.g. jobs, challenges, deals, campaigns) are time sensitive and so may become out of date after a month or two. This makes it hard to sustain engagement unless you have critical mass of user generated content. Some content has the viral factor such as campaigns. With respect to inspirations and tools (knowledge sharing), the challenge lies in curation and relevance.
The challenge lies in playing to your team’s strengths and designing specific experiments that you can measure and learn from. This brings us nicely to the final area of consideration which is how we can use analytics to learn what is working and what is not.
Learning from the data
One of the big advantages that technology gives us is the ability to analyse and learn from the data we collect. We can track exactly who logs on and at what time. We can see where they click and how much time they spend reading certain content pages. We can also track growth in membership and observe spikes of activity on social media.
From my research the best source of expertise on the use of analytics is MindValley Insights.
Ultimately, the art of digital engagement comes down to our ability to data driven insights with regular one to one dialogue (quantitative and qualititative data). Over time you will be able to identify incredmental gains in performance and scale up your efforts.
Summary
I hope that this article provides you with a rich, critical and actional introduction to driving digital engagement.
If you have any feedback or suggestions for how to make this article even better please get in touch. Also, if you have put any of these concept into action it would be great to learn from your experience.
Thanks
A
