Engaged Consumers

"If you have been following the postings of Rich Becker at Copywrite Ink then you will know he talks a lot about metrics and measurement. In one recent article Rich says,"The debate seems endless. The argument circular. And the affirmation echoes apparently tied to technologies like Google PageRank, Technorati authority, Alexa traffic, Feedburner subscriptions, Facebook friends, Twitter followers, return visitors, comment counts, and any combination of the aforementioned."



Rich is the reason I found this article to be of interest:

"As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can “count” engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?"

In one section I found this quote: "SLS - Engagement is the beginning of that. Trying to determine how much people like a show based on how much they talk about it. When Lost first was being talked about, everyone thought it wasn’t going to work - but our analysis of buzz said that it was going to work. In that case it turned out to be right. But there are also small, highly engaged audiences in some cases - Veronica Mars, The Office, Friday Night Lights - these are shows which ranked very high in buzz, but small in audience. The small engaged fan cultures are something we should be looking at. We also can’t forget that consumers are themselves channels - they are distributing content as well."

Go take a look. What do you think?