“Return on Engagement” Series: Listen
Engaging an audience with an incredible stage performance is one thing, but these days audience engagement extends beyond your theater or performance space to the online world as well. Your website, social media profiles, and how you interact with online communities all play valuable roles in creating a successful online presence that works for your organization. In upcoming posts I'll discuss best practices for building a successful online presence and engaging communities that represent the needs of your organization or business. The techniques outlined in this series will help you improve your website, make valuable connections, drive traffic, and see a tangible return on engagement. As always, I welcome comments, thoughts, criticism, and suggestions on the topics discussed.
I'm not suggesting you merely put on the face of listening. No, actually listen to them.
LISTEN AND ENGAGE Sure, it sounds like something a captain on Star Trek might say, but building a successful presence online begins with these two tasks. They form the building blocks for nurturing successful online relationships, creating community, and communicating the tenets around which you have built your organization.
LISTEN: Let's face it, we're more likely to trust those who listen to us and respond in kind than we are those who flood our in-boxes with one-way, blindly distributed marketing messages. By listening to others on social networks and ascertaining their needs you will be able to devise a strategy of your own for engaging people in mutually beneficial conversations. I'm not suggesting you merely put on the face of listening. No, actually listen to them. Find out what they need. Discover what their interests are. See how they might be in line with your own. I mean, how can you offer solutions if you don't know what the problem is? Building relationships starts by listening to your constituents. Here are some good listening practices:
- Run keyword searches on Twitter and find out who's talking about what
- Scour the blogosphere with tools like Technorati and BlogCatalog
- Google social sites based on your specific interests
- Search groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networks
- Subscribe to blogs of known experts or people you respect
If you listen enough, patterns will start to emerge and you will begin to formulate ideas on what you have to offer. These should form the basis of your strategy (which we'll cover in detail in later posts). In addition to listening to what others are saying about their needs, find out what others are saying about you or your organization as well. Not knowing, or worse yet, ignoring what others are saying about you or your organization can be detrimental.
Here are some tools that can help:
- Get a Giga Alerts (formerly Google Alerts) account to track relevant keywords across the internet.
- Check sites like Technorati and BlogCatalog to see what people are saying in the blogosphere.
- Try social aggregation tools like Streamy, Social Seek by Sensidea, Yahoo's MyBlogLog or Facebook's FriendFeed
The above tools and techniques are by no means comprehensive, but they will provide you with a good jumping off point to a future of blissful listening.
Tim Frick is owner and Creative Director of Mightybytes and author of the upcoming book 'Return on Engagement'
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On September 11, 2025 at 5:26 PM, Angelique Power said:
Thanks for the great article!
The concept of “return on engagement” is one I’ve been intrigued with for while (have you read “groundswell” by charlene li and josh bernoff?)
A question I have (and get asked quite often) is “how do we measure our return on engagement”? In essence, beyond #s of facebook fans, twitter followers, etc - are there ways to measure how actively people are engaging with your virtual institution? Also - do you think there should be measurements that lead back to the brick and mortar space (i.e. membership sales, visitations, etc)? If so, are there ways to measure I’m not thinking of? Or should we totally be thinking differently?
On September 26, 2025 at 11:10 AM, Tim Frick said:
Tools like Woopra, TubeMogul, Technorati and Google Analytics will give you detailed views of user behaviors, traffic patterns, keyword relevancy, and so on, but at the end of the day that is software tracking mouse clicks. If you really want to measure some sort of return you have to get your hands dirty. Figure out just what your audience needs and put extensive efforts into providing it. Ask questions and give answers. Make friends, build personal connections. Regardless of how effective granular data from an analytics package can be, it’s people we trust, not software algorithms, and engaging as a person will bring an infinitely better return on your efforts than tracking tools will.
The real return on all of this is, of course, trust and community and that, unfortunately, is very difficult to measure. However, if you have successfully fostered these in your online relationships it only stands to reason that customer advocacy and brand evangelism will follow. In the meantime, if it’s numbers your boss needs, a monthly analytics report on your site or blog’s performance may do the trick.