Engagement: The Meaning of Web 2.0 (and Media 2.0) and What to Do About It

MySpace is signing up 250,000 new users daily - March 2006 [source]

“Media companies don’t control the conversation anymore…” Rupert Murdoch 2007-05-07 [source]

The world where organisations controlled access to the media and operated on a ‘we publish; you consume‘ basis is disappearing. The impact of what has been called ‘Web 2.0′, as seen in blogs like this one, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, open source software, and social networking, is all around us.

Maybe that is obvious, but it is also unprecedented. The internet, i.e. the world’s first truly global network, has recently been supercharged: first by growth in bandwidth; secondly by a profusion of connected multimedia devices; and thirdly by an epidemic of social networking systems.

So Rupert Murdoch is right: these changes are profoundly important. This is not just about Web 2.0 it’s about Media 2.0. The impact extends far beyond the worldwide web. But if so, how should we respond?

Trying to find an answer we have been asking ourselves some questions :-

Cogapp has been working with interactive media for over twenty years, what have we been doing? What have we been doing for our clients? What have our clients been trying to achieve for their organisations? And what more can we all do now?

Our conclusion is that the answer to these questions lies in a practice - something that we have (all) been doing for the longest time but which now needs to be moved up-front and centre, to become the theme of our work and for our industry generally.

We are talking about ‘engagement’: a practice of open, active, mutual interaction, extended over time, in a group of more or less equal participants, undertaken for mutual benefit.

[For a discussion and definition of customer engagement, a current hot topic in brand marketing, see the excellent Wikipedia article on Customer Engagement. The engagement we are talking about goes wider than brands and customers.]

Engagement turns out to be what people want, what the new media can deliver and also the key to their development.

We arrived at ‘engagement’ by reviewing our past projects, examining what was good about them (or bad) and why.

Where we could point to success, ‘engagement’ was the word that kept cropping up: engagement between ourselves and our clients, engagement between our clients and their communities; the desire to stimulate engagement as a gateway to learning; the need for programmers to engage deeply with their technology; the use of social networking systems to stimulate engagement within a community.

It turns out that interactive media are the engaging media - engagement is what interactive media can deliver.

And as the interactive media become pervasive and predominant, engagement becomes a public expectation. Modern communities expect organisations to engage with them. Engagement is not just an opportunity for organisations it is also a challenge to which they have to rise.

Engagement is the key to the success of our products and the key to the success of our projects. Where our products create engagement between an organisation and its community they succeed, where engagement fails they fail. Similarly, engagement at all levels and between all stake holders turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be critical to success of the corresponding development projects.

Since we have adopted engagement as our theme we have found it endlessly useful. Useful for diagnosing how problems have arisen and how to fix them and also creative, suggestive of new ideas for projects and new ways of tackling them.

In the next post we’ll set out the four rules we are using to help us apply the theory of engagement to our work.