There’s been another eruption of discussion on Engagement. If (like me) you’re more interested in the higher level ideas not so oriented towards the “tool” aspects of this discussion, make sure you catch this post and hefty comments. For more, also here, here, and here.
At a high level, there really are 2 kinds of Engagement, and I think it would be helpful for us to start differentiating between them.
I’ve spoken in the past about our local CBS affiliate WTSP-10 and their Moms Tampa Bay effort as a great example of “old media” that gets Social and has created something quite powerful using that ‘ol stick of theirs.
WTSP’s 6 PM newscast now features “news pics” sent in by viewers in almost every show. They headline the story, run through the video they have, and on the way out, the anchor says,
“Here’s some pictures of the scene sent in by our viewers”.
Nice effort to be more interactive. If I was going to Optimize it, I’d like to see it a bit more personalization, which increases the prep time, of course. But it would be nice to hear the anchor say “Jody in Seminole sent us this picture” or something similar.
Optimizing Individual Communications
Where the Band 4 Optimization optimizes general communications like newsletters, the Band 5 Optimization is all about hyper-targeted communications to individuals. We’re talking mostly about special circumstance stuff here, more exotic ideas that may actually fall outside what you might traditionally think of as “Marketing”.
If Band 4 is the “Air Cover“, Band 5 is Special Ops (see Band Model).
In Band 5, you basically have algorithms of various kinds that are “sniffing” the databases looking for special situations that have exceedingly high ROMI. Often, these ideas deal in one way or another with high value customers that appear to be dis-Engaging; many of these scenarios related to Marketing, Service, or Product in one way or another.