3 points about engaging the customer worth noting.

1. Social KPIs: Quantity or quality?

Nearly all reporting for social media includes KPIs based on raw counts of interactions such as Likes, Shares, and Retweets. But as adoption of social channels and mobile devices continues to climb, even the most dysfunctional brands will continue to attract more followers and therefore higher raw engagement counts.

In addition, since fan bases are growing so rapidly, making comparisons between like time periods can be misleading. And it is difficult to compare brands with fan bases of different sizes. In short, the industry has been lacking a universal metric that gives apples-to-apple comparisons for engagement performance.

Digital Marketing Works, a strategic partner of Pappas MacDonnell, has developed a metric that measures per-fan engagement instead of raw counts. The metric has been shown to provide a consistent range of percentages that defines overall social success (or failure) in Facebook.

So whether it’s through this metric or some other, if you have lots of fans but low per-fan interactions, you are essentially using Facebook as a broadcast medium. On the other hand, you may have nurtured a smaller number of fans, but they’re highly engaged. Which is the right choice? It ultimately depends on a brand’s objectives.

Contributor: Aaron Zwas, Director of Emerging Technologies,
Digital Marketing Works, LLC

2. It’s time to get a better “read” on customers.

More and more, a key goal for marketers is customer evangelism. Much of branding is now about creating experiences that are so compelling that customers will want to identify with your brand, and talk about your company or products to other customers.

The challenge is how to “read” these conversations scattered across the web so you can react to what customers are really saying. For example, do you source only those conversations that mention your brand or product – or anything related to your business? How much weight do you put on certain comments? Are you overreacting to the negative ones?

Another issue is how and when do you automate? The technology to read conversations is changing so rapidly, analysts can’t keep up. Most solutions are a combination of technology and process because language is inherently difficult to interpret.

With an increasing imperative to hear what’s going on in real time and increasingly sophisticated ways to do so, this will be a watershed year for marketers’ honing their listening skills.

Contributor: Ann Marshman, Executive Director, The Leader’s Council

3. True engagement goes beyond the click.

In our highly connected world, it’s easy for marketers to think that online interaction is about all there is to customer engagement. But brands continue to need strategies that cross social, advertising, mobile, experiential, PR and other channels. They need strategies that emphasize true participation rather than what can sometimes be weak interactions that require nothing more of their audience than a click or two.

Increasingly, marketers and agencies will need to develop more meaningful brand stories and experiences that move people to actively contribute, not passively consume. It’s an inescapable trend and one every savvy marketer should hasten: true engagement through active contribution from audiences.

Contributor: Jeffrey Rutchik, Executive Vice President, George P. Johnson

What do you see on the horizon as we move into 2012 and beyond? We want to know.