Don’t make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people. When it comes to engagement, audience analysis is critical so you can make the best use of the resources you have in terms of time, money, and people. Are you trying to get people engaged to increase exposure? to provide customer service or answer questions? to encourage brand loyalty? to get to know the customer better? Whatever it is you are trying to do, you will need to spend time to create engagement with a particular group of customers or prospects. Figure out who can best further your brand goals and objectives by being engaged, and start there.

In Q4 of 2012 North Highland surveyed 2,000 business colleagues working in the Denver / Front Range markets about their use of social media both with customers and internally with employees. Click here for a write up of perspectives on the results:

Digital Engagement – Survey Results

Thanks to everyone who attended our Boardroom Talk series this morning on Digital Engagement!  It was a great crowd, and I was delighted to meet so many people who are thinking about what engagement really means to their brands.

For a summary of the discussion, please check it out here:

North Highland – Digital Engagement

Several people asked me what it ‘really means’ to have digital engagement as a part of your marketing strategy.  I suggest the following:

Digital engagement is about supporting your brand goals by giving people the opportunity to:

1. Share your brand content in a way that enhances their own reputation
2. Get service or sales support both from your internal staff and from others in the community
3. Have a useful conversation with you or with other customers
4. Express themselves to you in a transparent way
5. Advocate for your brand
6. Generate their own content that incorporates your brand
7. Provide their expertise to your community of users
8. Earn a social benefit in exchange for paying attention to your brand

I’d say, conditionally worth the hype.  Trying to engage with all of your customers all the time is an overwhelming task, but targeted engagement with the right audience can be extraordinarily beneficial to your brand, both in sales and service.

I am doing more and more with clients around ‘digital engagement’, as a new packaging for social media marketing. The ones who are doing it right are drawing a line between the breadth and coverage of most marketing goals and the depth and attention required for valuable engagement.  Defining what engagement means and how it is different from social media marketing is important.

I see engagement as a targeted relationship with an audience that can further promote your brand goals and objectives through connections that are timely, relevant, and useful to all parties. It is about giving your audience the opportunity to have a voice in your brand spaces, and providing back support and content that is meaningful to the individual who has chosen to engage with you.

Engagement takes time, intention, and appropriate content. It is more than just having property on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter, it is about having the capacity to provide content and conversation as appropriate with targeted audiences.

Yesterday I wrote about expertise as either common or differentiated. One way to think about it is through the lens of the Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm theory. RBV gives us four attributes of a strategic asset. The asset must be Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, and Non-substitutable (the VRIN attributes) to be a strategic asset that can sustain a competitive advantage.

Common expertise (in consulting I would call that project management, change management, process work, and traditional strategy work) is Valuable. It is possibly Inimitable, but with the plethora of templates and other resources available these days, that’s arguable. It is not, however, Rare. As for Non-substitutable, that probably depends on the problem being solved.

Differentiated expertise is Rare, less open to Imitation, and more prone to being Non-substitutable. The question is…. how Valuable is it? Its value is market sensitive – there have to be clients who need it. And over time, it may become less Rare and easier to substitute.

Consulting companies are challenged to maintain both types of expertise in their resources, and to recognize that while everyone might be an expert, not everyone has (or needs to have) differentiated expertise. Investing in and maintaining a diverse knowledge pool as an asset requires thinking about these things differently.

In consulting we talk a lot about bringing expertise to our clients. Sometimes, though, we get caught up in not wanting to appear elitist or exclusive, so the expertise gets downplayed. It is a weird confluence of mixed messages for our clients and for our people.

I was thinking today that we have to be careful to recognize that expertise is not necessarily rare or exclusive, or even particuarly valuable. Being an expert in many things is a factor of education, the number of times you’ve done it, and the recency of your experience, and there may be many people who share in that equation. In consulting, we have many people who are experts at project and program management, change management, process design, and other ‘bread and butter’ consulting services. Calling someone else an expert in a specialty like health care reform doesn’t change that some people are more ‘general experts’, who bring years of experience and talent to the blocking and tackling of getting things done in business.

Differentiated expertise is by definition rare and hard to substitute.  Whether it is valuable or not depends on the business needs of the moment. Because differentiated expertise may eventually either become irrelevant or become a common expertise that many people have, people with differentiated expertise have to watch the winds closely and continually stay current, timely, and relevant to maintain their value.

I heard a client talking about the use of YouTube to support a 24×7 contact center. She records a message every week that goes out to everyone, and they can watch her deliver the message by following her. It sounds like it goes over much better than the dreaded weekly e-mail full of bits and pieces, and it gives her a way to connect with an audience in a more personal way.  Really forward thinking, and coming from a woman in her late 40s who works at a very traditional company.  It made me rethink some of my assumptions about how to best use social media as a tool.

Great discussion today from four different clients about how they are handling relationships between marketing, sales, and service. Seems everyone has their challenges and their strengths.  Alignment is the word of the day, getting everyone to represent the brand consistently to the customer while providing different things and with different objectives / measurements.

One really interesting idea was a company that is doing job shadowing across groups, having marketing folks go on sales calls, sales people ride along on service calls, service people work on a marketing campaign. The comment that stuck with me is “it felt ‘heavy’ when we started, but the results are so positive we are saving time and improving customer satisfaction dramatically on the back end, so it is totally worth it.”

If you are in Denver in February, please consider joining us at our Boardroom Talk series. We’ll be talking about Digital Engagement, together with my colleague Merritt Rutledge from Western Union.  It promises to be an interesting and informative morning!

Click HERE to register!