Enticing Engagement
Elizabeth F. churchill
Yahoo! Research | churchill@acm.org
Human engagement
A: Do you love me?
B: Yes
A: Will you marry me?
B: Yes.
Internet engagement
A: Do you love us?
B: click click click
<Introduce new feature/offer>
A: Do you love us now?
B: click click click
Internet disengagement
A: Do you love us?
B: click click click
A: Do you love us now?
B:
<Introduce new feature/offer>
A: What about now?
B:
A: Hello? Where did you go?
ing; people can be negatively
engaged. This is particularly
true when something is stand-
ing between them and their
desired state or goal; think of
the term “military engagement.”
Whatever the form of engage-
ment—positive or negative—cen-
tral to concept is the triggering
and capturing of attention, of
being beguiled and perhaps
focused to the exclusion of
everything else. Engagement
can last beyond a single episode;
lasting engagement can manifest
across many episodes of focus
where someone comes back
for more, again and again and
again. For most people in the
world of marketing and media,
the notion of successful engage-
ment is when someone comes
back again and again and/or
they recommend the experience
to others. So ideally, people will
have an in-the-moment, positive,
more or less immersed experi-
ence, followed by a lasting posi-
tive attraction that spreads to
others like a virus.
May + June 2010
For me, long gone are the days
when the word “engagement”
conjured up diamonds, parties,
and champagne. These days
engagement is all about divining how much love your users or
audience have for product(s) and/
or application(s). In the Internet
world, the word “engagement” is
intimately associated with measurement, metrics, and monetization; it is all about clicks and
conversion, visitors, page views
and duration. This is the world
of media marketing, and of
Internet success and failure.
what is Engagement?
Before I dig into Internet
engagement measurement, I
want to step back and think
about what engagement means
to me. When first asked about
engagement by a colleague
at work, I spouted all I knew
about the experience of engage-
ment as I understood it from a
psychologist’s worldview. Flow.
Immersion. Fascination. The
swift passing of time as atten-
tion is held—tempus fugit. The
opposite of restless boredom,
where time expands painfully
and you feel itchy and twitchy
and ready for any external
stimulus beyond what you are
doing now.
creating Engagement
“Engagement” as a concept is
itself beloved and beguiling for
media marketers and for the
designers of products, services,
applications. Take a look: The
Web is brimming with smart
people opining on the topic.
In this world, marketers, data
miners, statisticians, designers,
and a host of other profession-
als come together. “Engagement
