Trendy business buzzwords aren’t any fun until you form an opinion and seek feedback to get to the substance of the issue.

Customer Engagement is one of those terms that is being mentioned more frequently than Kim Kardashian was during the Super Bowl. It’s the 2010 version of “what’s hot, what’s new, what’s next?”

The question is, should Customer Engagement be treated as a new marketing sub-set, on par with Loyalty and Word of Mouth Marketing, or is it a concept that’s been around for quite some time and just happens to be a point of pain in the Relationship Value Chain (RVP) for marketers today?

Relationship Value Chain? That’s the term that my good friend and former Colloquy colleague, Kelly Hlavinka, coined almost 10 years ago. The experience of many at the once proud Frequency Marketing was that customer value increased across a spectrum of customer interaction. Link the points of interaction and you had a value chain that loyalty marketers could use to influence communication plans and allocate marketing budget dollars to encourage specific behaviors.

The RVP is similar to the “acquisition – activation – usage – retention” lifecycle marketing that credit card issuers have been using for years, but takes objectives down to a more granular level.

One example of a flow that constitutes a RVP:

• Awareness
• Response to Invitation
• Program Enrollment
• First purchase
• Multiple purchases in response to offers
• Redemption for Reward
• Response to Survey
• Response to Future Bonus
• Multiple Redemptions

No one has a lock on defining the steps in the chain as they should be customized to the business situation under review. Going to back to Customer Engagement, just where does it live in the value chain used as an example here?

Let’s look at a few steps in the RVP and see where, if accused of being “Engaged”, there would be enough evidence to gain a conviction!

Program Enrollment – Doesn’t everyone enroll in programs without much care for future interactions? I enroll in just about every program where I know the odds are that I’ll be back (by choice or force) and the offer looks worthy enough to give it a whirl. The only caveat is that I won’t sign up if the data collection hurdle is too high at the outset.

First Purchase – You’ve got my attention, but what makes you think I’m “Engaged”? I may be a cherry-picking consumer or have just satisfied a one-time need for your product or service. Not enough evidence to convict me as engaged at this point in time.

First Redemption – I’ve stayed around long enough to make multiple purchases over time – how else would I have qualified to redeem? But did you catch me in a cycle of life that won’t soon be repeated, or can you count on me to do it again? Engagement? We’re getting closer, some say “yes”.

Survey Response – I’ve transacted, collected, redeemed, and now I am willing to actually have a conversation. You’ve got my attention, but I am skeptical of what you will do with the information and if I will hear from you again. Does this sound akin to dating? Conversation is certainly an accelerator to engagement, but does not constitute the end goal itself.

Multiple Redemptions – Once I’ve completed the purchase/collection/redemption cycle more than once, I think you can count me as “Engaged”. The focus shifts now to retaining my interest, expanding the conversation, and developing more business as a result.

My take on Customer Engagement is that it describes an end objective that marketers hope to achieve through smart execution of a well designed data-driven Customer Strategy. If you try to define engagement as one of the individual steps, take Enrollment as an example, then what you are truly talking about is more tactical ala “how to create awareness for a program and convert interest to enrollment”.

It’s a step along the way, not engagement itself.

The Loyalty Truth on Customer Engagement is that it has been around for quite a while. The reason the topic has been deserving of the spotlight lately is that customers are increasing difficult to engage, not to mention retain.

What’s your take?

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association held its “WOMM-U” event earlier this month in South Beach.  The conference report which follows was originally published at www.TheWiseMarketer.com on May 28, 2009 as filed by Bill Hanifin, North American Contributing Editor.

If you are interested in the latest news on Loyalty and Relationship marketing, I strongly encourage you to Register here for a free subscription to the Wise Marketer

Among weekly updates and special reports, the WiseMarketer also offers the Loyalty Guide III,  the most comprehensive resource covering the industry today.

Loyalty Moving from Marketing to Engagement

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s conference in Florida earlier this month provided some surprising insights, according to contributing editor Bill Hanifin of Hanifin Loyalty, who notes that the loyalty business is desperately re-engineering itself as programme sponsors look for innovations to freshen up their programmes.

Among the hottest topics concerning loyalty marketers are those of ‘engagement‘ and ‘word of mouth‘, with both having been quickly identified as effective paths to building more frequent and meaningful dialogues between sponsors and consumers.

Among the brands represented at the conference were big names such as Amway, Dell, Disney, Heinz, Kraft, Lenovo, McDonalds, NBC, PepsiCo, Proctor & Gamble, Texas Instruments, Unilever, and Walmart. The Web 2.0 names were also present, including Facebook, Google, MySpace, and Yelp.

Yelp’s Geoff Donaker kicked off the event with an overview of what he called a “platform for lifestyle blogging”. Over 21 million people had used the service to search for local businesses during the previous month, and the bulk of the consumer reviews posted broke down into 31% for restaurants and 23% for shopping. Donaker provided several examples of the power of the Yelp service, such as a carpet cleaning business in San Francisco which had invested in improving its customer service and generated such good reviews that the company was able to save US$100,000 per year in Yellow Pages adverts.

NBC also discussed its social media strategy, noting that community conversations, blog posts, and so-called “tweets” can not only build brand awareness and loyalty but also positively impact search engine results. Charles Edwards, CEO for Federated Media, also confirmed the importance of a strong search engine presence (particularly citing Google rankings): “It used to be that the homepage of your web site was your first digital impression, but now it’s the Google search result. Every marketer is a publisher now, and we don’t just compete with competitors but with any consumer that is also talking about us.”

Lenovo shared the story of how it tackled the challenge of making the most of its US$120 million Olympic sponsorship in 2008. The PC manufacturer chose to recruit 100 Olympic athletes, offering each a free technology solution and asking them to blog live from Beijing. Lenovo chose “long tail” athletes (i.e. those who weren’t in major sports, and who weren’t expected to draw general media attention). The campaign was a tremendous success and the athlete blogs quickly became the “insider’s view of the Olympics” during that highly competitive time.

Jeben Berg of YouTube also highlighted the power of video in marketing, noting that 15 minutes of video is uploaded every 60 seconds, all day every day. YouTube claims to be the largest site in the US (and the sixth-largest in the world), and boasts 81.6 million unique US-based visitors each month. Interestingly, the largest demographic in this massive set of visitors comes from the 35-49 age group.

WOMMA was able to get representatives of both MySpace and Facebook onto the same stage at the same time, and Heidi Browning (MySpace) and Chris Pan (Facebook) compared and contrasted the two social networks in detail. Browning exploded some myths about MySpace (particularly stressing that the site is not “just for teens”), and claiming that more than 70 million of its users are in the 18-34 age group in the US alone. Pan explained that successful Facebook marketing campaigns usually involve “building movements, not campaigns”, with a good recent example being the election campaign of Barack Obama.

Duncan Wardle of Disney discussed lessons learned using social media, and described a campaign that invited people to apply for their ‘dream Disney character job’. This word of mouth campaign quickly became viral and the responses were overwhelming. But Wardle was also practical, noting that “impressions don’t equal engagement” and suggesting that brands who don’t change from marketing to engaging risk soon becoming mere “nostalgia brands”.

The conclusion was that advertising and traditional ‘interruption marketing’ techniques are slowly but surely being replaced with collaboration, co-creation and dialogue with willing consumers.

This article is copyright 2009 TheWiseMarketer.com and is published here with permission.

There have been a number of viral marketing campaigns that have created a vortex of attention online and, today being Mother’s Day, I have to add MomsRising to the list.

I innocently clicked through an invitation to celebrate Mother’s Day in a unique way and was surprised at what I found. The link landed me on the “Mother of the Year” video which I easily customized and sent to several of my favorite “Moms”. It was easy, funny, and I got positive feedback from several of the recipients.

At last look on the MomsRising web site, there have been over 7 million views of the video, making it officially a viral marketing success.

What’s behind the organization? According to the web site, “MomsRising is working to bring together millions of people who share a common concern about the need to build a more family-friendly America. Started in May of 2006, MomsRising has gained over 150,000 citizen members and is rapidly growing”.

This is a great example of a group that knows what its about and consciously crafted a campaign that was compelling enough to drive engagement and subtle in its effort to raise awareness for its mission.

I can’t vouch in more detail for their intentions, but raising awareness for the importance of Motherhood can’t be all bad.  They’re on Twitter and can be followed @MomsRising.

I’m headed to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association event in South Beach this week and can’t wait to get more feedback on this, the latest, of viral marketing campaigns to solidly hit the bulls-eye.

Let me know what you think of this effort and send me suggestions for your favorite viral campaign from the past year.

Happy Mother’s Day!

There have been a number of viral marketing campaigns that have created a vortex of attention online and, today being Mother’s Day, I have to add MomsRising to the list.

I innocently clicked through an invitation to celebrate Mother’s Day in a unique way and was surprised at what I found. The link landed me on the “Mother of the Year” video which I easily customized and sent to several of my favorite “Moms”. It was easy, funny, and I got positive feedback from several of the recipients.

At last look on the MomsRising web site, there have been over 7 million views of the video, making it officially a viral marketing success.

What’s behind the organization? According to the web site, “MomsRising is working to bring together millions of people who share a common concern about the need to build a more family-friendly America. Started in May of 2006, MomsRising has gained over 150,000 citizen members and is rapidly growing”.

This is a great example of a group that knows what its about and consciously crafted a campaign that was compelling enough to drive engagement and subtle in its effort to raise awareness for its mission.

I can’t vouch in more detail for their intentions, but raising awareness for the importance of Motherhood can’t be all bad.  They’re on Twitter and can be followed @MomsRising.

I’m headed to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association event in South Beach this week and can’t wait to get more feedback on this, the latest, of viral marketing campaigns to solidly hit the bulls-eye.

Let me know what you think of this effort and send me suggestions for your favorite viral campaign from the past year.

Happy Mother’s Day!