Research clearly indicates that organisations have accepted 2 facts-
1.Cultivating a respectable level of customer engagement is a strategic challenge.
2.The volumes and degree of consumer engagemnent will have long term implications for a firm.
Let's take a look at social media's role in this entire talk about consumer engagement.
Mario Sundar at the Linkedin Corporate Blog lists the top fifteen corporate blogs [1] on the basis of their technorati authority.
Technorati authority is a measure of the number of blogs linking into the blog under discussion. In other words, technorati authority is indicative of-
- Popularity of a blog as in terms of volume of readers.
- Volume of user generated content about a blog, with those many other users having generated content regarding that particular organisation, brand or product.
For the purpose of this discussion on corporate blogs, let us assume that a significant number of visitors to the blogs in question are customers-prospective and current.
Further, as per Ghuneim’s typology of engagement, a customer who comments on an online organisational initiative measures ‘medium’ on the degree of engagement continuum while a customer who creates content, as in blog about an organisation, brand, product, or service rates as 'highly engaged'.
Hence, the technorati authority(measure of no. of consumers generating content about an organisational product or brand on their sites) can be assumed to be indicative of the volume of significantly ENGAGED consumers to some extent.The study of Consumer relationships could significantly benefit by taking into account the technorati authority of the blogs, to track the volumes of consumer engagement.
Some observations-
- There is a positive correlation between the reach(percentage of global internet users who visit the site) of a blog(source:Alexa.com) and the Technorati authority of the corporate blog.
- There is a positive correlation between the Technorati authority of a corporate blog and the volume of Consumer Generated Media(source : Blogpulse).
Engagement refers to the creation of experiences that allow companies to build deeper, more meaningful and sustainable interactions between the company and its customers and appears to be the first step for any corporate towards building consumer loyalty, satisfaction, involvement and evangelism. Social media sure seems to provide a way.