[This is the third in a series of articles about the theory of engagement. We believe that engagement is the key to success in the world of Web 2.0/Media 2.0. Here is a link to the first article. In our second article we proposed a practical framework, the four rules of engagement: be engaging; be engaged; be authentic; be agile. This article continues the series by expanding on the first rule.]

1. Be engaging

1.1. Attract and reward attention - be attractive; get noticed; be relevant; be timely

A media rich world is an aesthetic/artistic one. It offers great opportunities to get noticed and create attractive products, but there is increasing competition for the attention of your audience. Hence people start to talk about an attention economy.

To succeed in this world you need great design, great content and great marketing. Under this latter heading, in a Media 2.0 world, we should include findability through search engine optimisation, news coverage (on and offline) generated by PR and community connections generated by online relations and community building programmes.

1.2 Encourage participation

It is the genius of Facebook and YouTube that they have found attractive, accessible and lightweight ways for individuals to participate in their projects and add value for the whole user community.

How can your media offering encourage community participation ? How can you get the audience to participate in building it themselves ?

Once you have taken someone from ‘passive observer’ to ‘active participant’ their engagement in your offering and their stake in your success both increase hugely.

1.3 Be pervasive - on the desktop; in the living room; in the pocket; out and about; in your own offerings and in other people’s

The digital media are pervasive and intertwined. Look at organisations like the BBC and how they are delivering in different media. Also look at the opportunities opening up around online services like Google, Amazon and Facebook to showcase your material within other properties. There is a mad proliferation of media, channels, platforms and properties so the challenge has to be to find the right places to go to engage with your customers and community.

A final thought: Given that these are the rules it’s not hard to see why user-centred design looms so large in the best development practice. By intimately understanding what your audience like, what they want to do and where they are you stand the best possible chance of being truly engaging for them.

If engagement is the key to the Web 2.0 (and Media 2.0) world - and that’s what we believe - then what are the implications ? What are the rules of this new world ?

Reviewing our own experience (over twenty years and hundreds of projects) and what we know of the industry at large, we have developed a proposal: four rules for success in the world of Web 2.0 and Media 2.0.

Our four proposed rules are as follows :-

1. Be engaging - reach out, garner attention, give the network reasons to engage with you
2. Be engaged - join in, be part of the larger process, grow your network and help to grow the network as a whole
3. Be authentic - remember who you are and take the process to heart
4. Be agile - things are happening quickly, respond quickly and economically

The first rule addresses the economy of attention - interactive media are engaging media and people now expect you to compete for their attention and reward it when you get it.

The second rule addresses the network economy - as the network created by online media grows it brings bigger and bigger rewards for those who can work with it effectively.

The third rule is a rider to the first two and likely applies to any organisation working in a time of accelerated change - but it is particularly important in a media-saturated world where organisations and people have enormous freedom over where they go and how they present themselves (and will therefore encounter many challenges to their sense of identity).

Lastly, the fourth rule speaks to the unprecedented speed with which the Web 2.0 world is developing and the opportunities it provides for rapid, collaborative, development.

As we said above, we arrived at this set of rules by reviewing the past, out of that review came a dozen or so principles which seemed to apply pretty universally. The process of condensing that larger set down to these four keys was then surprisingly quick and the result feels right and has been pleasingly robust - i.e. working with the four rules has confirmed for us their importance and primacy. Time will show how well they stand up when more widely publicised and applied.

The four rules will each be the subject of forthcoming articles.

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.