Slicecast

This week I have mostly been thinking about Consumer Participation, the process in between the extremes of Consumer Generated Content and Brand Advertising. Consumer Participation might also be referred to as 'Engagement', or a measure of participation in a specific or broad brand level model. It's really come from looking at the effects of the Dove campaign I reported on last week, and some other stuff that has emerged from YouTube. Seems we can't get away from video these days..

So in the last week the blogosphere seems to have gone Dove Evolution crazy. Some immediate metrics I've been able to pull are:

Data valid to 1 November 2006 -

• 62 individual video's tagged "Dove Evolution" on YouTube
• 2,490,090 combined viewings of the Top 10 of these videos
• 3,698 ratings of the Top 10 of these videos (0.15% rating conversion)
• 1,594 blog entries tagged "Dove Evolution" via Technorati with some authority (4,146 with any authority)
  

Technorati trend for "Dove Evolution" (01-Nov-06)

The technorati trend chart shows the huge spike (yes the volumes are low.. but look at the spike) since the original YouTube video launched. Remember - all this buzz is for a TV campaign with an agency uploaded video to YouTube.

All in all this is rather impressive.

So it got me thinking, clearly Consumers Participation is happening, the numbers are not necessarily off the chart, but as with all conversion metrics we can observe a funnel - 2.5 million viewings with considerable commenting, rating and general YouTube participation. Thousands of blog entries, that tie a specific emotion to the campaign - each blog entry with a micro-sphere of influence (defined through the Small World Phenomenon - I have a network, each individual connects to another network and so on). My 10 blog readers are influenced by me who will influence others. Rather interesting WOM connotations there.

If consumers are therefore participants in advertising, directly or indirectly this will help us to clarify the confusion around definitions of "Engagement", and will help us to define metrics (more specifically consistent metrics) that relate to the influence of a campaign.

It occurs to me that Engagement is hierarchical, that the funnel applies and that different segments will engage in different ways. Like in the example above, when we connect through digital channels there are different levels of participation ranging from Consumer created (often spoof) advertising through to viewing. This isn't necessarily bad - your mother probably won't fire up iMovie and create her own TV Ad for her favourite brand, but then if she watches a genuine piece of Information not Advertising she may be influenced to research further.

This leads me to the conclusion. If we want to create a framework for measurement around the concept of engagement, or Consumer Participation, then we need to think multidimensional in order to capture the nature of the participation. From here we can then further refine to define specifics against target segments (or use it as a basis for defining segments). Here's how I visualise it:

Thus, we have a starting point for defining Engagement.

:)