Definitions. Worthless. Waste of Time. And I promise I won’t retweet every day for the next year.
Possibly worse than defining engagement is measuring engagement. It sounds great. But, you’re probably missing the real problem…disengagement. Of course, you need to have customers in order to experience this phenomenon. Maybe that’s why people without customers over-engage in all of the wrong ways. It only ends up making you look desperate, in a segment built on networks.
Left Brain vs Right Brain Thinking
The right brainers are going to always lean toward engagement. To them it’s hugely important and they are good at executing it. It doesn’t matter that the metrics are merely validation of you spending your time engaging. Is there really, in a social media world, a way to tie this into the bottom line? Don’t strain your right brain – there is not. And that’s coming from a mid-brain person. I’ve spent my career being creative, but I’ve also spent a lot of it involved with analyzing businesses objectively as well. You could test me, I’m not sure how the test would come out.
For the left brain people, they are going to rapidly identify the problem because they will break things down into logical units. If you can’t correlate the effort to a predictable outcome, why would you waste you time doing it? Thus, these types of people – at least the ones independent enough to make their own decisions – will look to measure something that has quantifiable impact – disengagement in this case.
The marketing people I tend to follow talk about disengagement. I wonder why more people don’t. Are these types of marketing people just stupid? They don’t get the whole picture? Is it just more subjective than that? Or some times you just have to use intuition (based on what?) and feel what’s right?
Disengagement and defection is a quantifiable loss in value to a business. And if you can identify it (and you can) and understand why it’s happening (and you can), then you can deal with it before it happens and prevent it (in many cases). Sure, you need to get customers in the first place, but understanding disengagement can help you do that too. Your business isn’t the only one where customers defect. It happens with your competition too. So, engage their customers when you know they are defecting and there you have your justification for engagement. Or just innovate – I suggest you build your business around both 
Know what to say. Know when to say it. Know who to say it to. And know where to say it. Logical, sequential, rational,analytical,objective, reproducible. Engagement through disengagement. Your new definition.
