Digital Engagement….what is it and how do I do it?
It sounds easy to understand, and even to do, but it isn’t as easy as you might think. I’ll explain it in simple terms and give you a few tips on how to plan for Digital Engagement (DE) in your organization. It is not simply using a website or social media tool to push out your messages one-way.
Simply put, DE uses digital tools and techniques to find, mobilize, listen to, engage, and dialogue with key stakeholder groups for a strategic purpose or issue. The key here is that it involves two-way interaction in many cases.
DE examples include:
- A university might use it for brand advancement, student recruitment, or student athletics pride building.
- A company might want employee feedback in co-developing a new strategic vision and plan.
- A non-profit organization might use it for collecting feedback from users on a new plan or program.
- An airline might use it for managing delays and customer complaints in real-time.
- An energy company might use it for issues management about a new and unpopular oil pipeline.
- A sports team might use it to promote the team brand to build support, and sell tickets and merchandise.
While there are many DE technology options, here are a few key tools that can be used:
- Online surveys – to collect initial data and feedback on a specific issue or cause, and to help formulate a DE plan.
- Websites, microsites, mobile sites – often as a first stop leading to more engaging interactive tools..
- Social media tools – based on your audience / stakeholder groups. Great for monitoring and engagement.
- Online forums, chat boards, and digital town halls – to allow for open dialogue.
- Blogs – that allow for feedback, comments, and ratings.
- Analytic tools – to measure reach, engagement, interaction, conversion, and other KPIs.
- CRM systems – that can collect and manage the stakeholder and engagement data.
There are many specific tools and software available within the key areas above. Some free, some paid. Choose strategically based on the steps below.
A framework to set up and integrate digital engagement into your marketing, communications or external relations plans for most organizations would generally include the following:
- Clearly understand your key objective. ie. enhancing customer service, feedback collection, issues management.
- Establish a vision, goals, and desired outcomes.
- Clearly understand who your audiences or stakeholder groups are, where they are, and what they want or need.
- Be specific, it’s not “everyone”, and they don’t want or need everything.
- Segment them into groups by demographics or other attributes if needed.
- Learn about and understand what influences them, pushes their buttons, and makes them engage.
- To achieve steps 1 and 2 you may need to perform research or surveys of your audiences to help establish objectives, learn about their preferences, trends, influence criteria, preferred channels, and other valuable information to implement into your DE framework and strategic plan.
- Determine if you have existing assets and tools in place. ie. a CRM database of contacts, a network or audience members, social media tools, a high traffic website, money to finance the project.
- Determine what tools and technologies you need to enroll for, or buy, and begin implementing them based on the steps above. You won’t need them all – and that is a key mistake people make – they set up 20 tools when they only need 4 and should simply use those 4 well to achieve the objective.
- Establish an implementation plan – including costs, a schedule, tools, team players, and key roll-out steps.
- Ensure you have analytics in place to measure engagement across the platforms and channels you use.
- You’ll likely want or need to develop user guidelines, policies, and other materials in support of your DE plan.
- Implement, measure, adapt, enhance and continue
Organizations are becoming serious about their digital engagement efforts and have moved past the “let’s wait and see” stage or the “one-way communications” process into the full adoption of a strategic DE plan and technology integration.
There is much more depth to this topic and I could have written many pages but I offer the quick overview above. If you would like more information or assistance in establishing a DE program in your organization, please contact me.
*Photo courtesy of http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
You must be logged in to post a comment.