Contributed By Dan Neely, founder and CEO of Networked Insights

There has been a lot of recent talk about “Engagement”. Engagement is the new metric for social media, the measure of success for social media marketing. Although clearly defining engagement has been a challenge and people have disagreed on setting standards, it is certainly a concept worth exploring.

As soon as social media started to change the way people communicate and share interests, values or concerns, it became a gold mine of customer intelligence and insight. The key to unlocking this intelligence is to understand engagement.

What is engagement? Engagement is a combination of how people interact with each other and content (viewing, posting, inviting, rating, etc.) and what causes people to change or define their behavior (how influential people or content are).

Engagement not only shows where people are spending their time, and what topics they are discussing and with whom, but also shows the degree and depth of customer-to-customer interactions. If ad placement is based on engagement, advertisers know that the advertising is more relevant to the people that see it because it is based on the topics and people that they engage with.

For advertisers and marketers, knowing facts about their audience before spending money on social media is a huge benefit. For example, if Nike notices that a large number of users on MySpace are engaging around a particular shoe model and that very few people are doing so on Facebook, it would make a lot more sense to spend more heavily on MySpace and know exactly where to place and direct that spend. This tactic uses engagement to ensure results, not just to measure them.

Marketers all acknowledge the importance of engagement. While the subjective aspects of the metric have yet to be defined, the factual elements taken from customer engagement provide the real value. Using engagement as a way to guide and predict your ad buy or marketing spend is a clear and simple method that leverages the customer intelligence that can be gained from engagement metrics. This intelligence can also help accurately inform the content and message of the resulting marketing collateral to ensure it resonates with the target audience.

Engagement is here to stay. Just like any new metric, it will take some time to take-hold and become fully standardized, but it is undeniably a multifaceted and powerful metric that can provide value to marketers throughout the marketing process – especially before it even starts.

About the Author:

Daniel Neely
Dan is the founder and CEO of Networked Insights, the leader in customer intelligence across social media. His 10 plus years of entrepreneurial, management and operational experience with technology companies, has given him the expertise in customer intelligence and experience with the challenges companies face in gathering relevant, real-time insights about their customers.
Before starting Networked Insights, Dan co-founded Market Performance Partners, which guided companies in market ownership through customer intelligence. Prior to that, he was the director of strategy at Scient, one of the fastest growing services company in history. Before Scient, Dan was part of the team that launched eSurance, the leading online insurance company.

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Contributed by Sarah Gibson, President, Accent Business Communication
(See complete bio below the article)

As employees, we all want to be seen as team players, but when a change is introduced to our teams at work, most of us cringe internally. In order to minimize the stress innovation and change can cause to our psyches, we each need to keep in mind what we risk losing when a new idea is introduced.

One approach to understanding our response to the change process is to look at change through a generational perspective. This short piece will help you see change as a three-step process and give you some perspective on how each generation may view innovation and change.

William Bridges approaches change as a three-phase process—the end, the in-between and the new beginning. Ultimately, we go through all three phases simultaneously, but the end goal is to realize change is a new beginning.

Here’s a quick example. When I started my own business, I had to acknowledge the end of a steady paycheck, friendships at work and corporate backing. During my in-between phase, I would vacillate between “I love owning my own business” and “Was I nuts for doing this?”. During the new beginning phase, I realized that my thinking had shifted to completely accept the change and embrace the idea of working on my own.

Since we go through all phases at once, I still have days where I experience loss and wish I had my corporate career, even though I’ve shifted to really loving being on my own.

The same is true for change for each of us. However the key to moving you and your work team to the new beginning phase is to accept the end of your previous processes before change and innovation took you to a new beginning.

From a generational perspective, we have to acknowledge what each generation loses during change. In essence, if we introduce a new idea, we’ve asked them to let go of something important to one’s generational framework.

For example, a WWII person is asked to give up his sense of loyalty to a product. Or perhaps he is asked to give up knowing where he fits into the chain of command.

A Baby Boomer facing change has to let go of the energy, recognition and dedication she put into a product. Sometimes she may also feel that she has to give up her competitive edge and expertise when an innovation comes her way.

A Gen Xer feels threatened because change asks her to give up a sense of independence and flexibility.

A Millennial struggles least with change because he has become so accustomed to change that adaptability has become key to his skill set. Still, he may feel a loss when his friendships at work are weakened when a process pulls him away from those friends.

Ultimately, the best way for us to become team players during change is to acknowledge both what we risk losing during change and what others risk losing. If you are introducing a new innovation, consider your audience. What are you asking them to say goodbye to during the end stage of change.

From there, you can move toward the new beginning of acceptance using the strengths each generation brings to the workplace.

Contributing writer: Sarah Gibson

Bio:
After identifying a need for written communication and generational issues training in the Midwest, Sarah Gibson founded Accent Business Communication in 2004. She has offered her classes to a variety of companies, including Harley-Davidson, Metavante and the Wisconsin state government. Beyond her organizational training programs, Sarah also teaches for the evening MBA program at UW-Madison.

Sarah holds a Master’s degree from North Dakota State University and has been teaching in academic and corporate worlds since 1998. In addition, she’s a member of Madison Area Business Consultants, Society of Human Resource Management, and the American Society of Training and Development.

This article is part of the April 2008 issue of BrainWaves E-magazine on Innovation and Ideation

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Contributed By Darin J. Eich, Ph.D.

We hear from many organizations that they desire a positive culture of innovation within their organizations that relies on the collaboration, contribution, and shared leadership of all employees. At BrainReactions, we have created a program to achieve positive outcomes in this area. During the final three years I worked on my doctoral dissertation studying high quality leadership programs, I was also creating and testing an innovation program for BrainReactions. This was a leadership program designed to help participants learn and engage in ideation and innovation for real purposes.

Like many companies, we highly value creating and sustaining a positive culture of innovation in our organization. Achieving this requires an intentional approach to develop the people of your company as exemplary creators, innovators, and leaders. Our vision with our leadership training program at BrainReactions involved moving from brainstorm sessions to a front end of innovation leadership program. This moves from just generating the ideas to also including training and development of the people who innovate.

In addition to the research of high quality programs, which included interviews of 62 stakeholders across four different exemplary leadership programs, the researcher developed and tested a new innovation program and individual program sessions with BrainReactions brainstormers. During a three-year period of research and testing, approximately 100 sessions where conducted, assessed, and improved accordingly. Sessions were qualitative and consisted of 5-12 individuals per session. Sessions were recorded, transcribed, and assessed for participant engagement, idea quantity and quality. The researcher employed the constant comparative method, an analytic induction grounded theory data analysis technique, to explore the data and construct a theory.

The theory of high quality leadership programs developed in the dissertation study is grounded in those programmatic attributes that, when enacted, contribute significantly to enhancing learning and leadership development. The data analysis revealed 16 attributes of high quality leadership programs organized into three clusters: a) participants engaged in building and sustaining a learning community; b) student-centered experiential learning experiences; and c) research grounded continuous program development. Through the program attributes, participants learn about innovation, leadership and themselves in the course of engaging in the leadership process while reflecting on and applying their new learning and skills in collaborative action with others.

The results of this multi-case grounded theory study of high quality leadership programs could be applied and adapted to enhance leadership development and innovation in a wide range of organizations. This theory will allow organizations to enhance their programs and participants’ leadership development by helping participants improve themselves through self-discovery, personal development, reflective practice and collaborative leadership action with others. This leadership action and learning can be directed towards idea generating for innovation to meet changing needs and opportunities for the organization though helping individuals contribute to and share leadership in an organizational culture of innovation.

To be a high quality program involves anchoring the systems and program in research, both what has happened elsewhere and what you have discovered internally. Our high quality leadership program for innovation that has yielded numerous positive individual, organizational, and client outcomes involves three clusters of attributes for program development. Both the diverse and engaged participants cluster as well as systems learning for continuous program improvement cluster are leveraged for development in addition to the individual centered experiential brainstorming experience cluster.

In essence I recommend more organizations to implement a leadership program that allows all employees to contribute to a positive culture of innovation through participating in innovation together. Programs can be constructed and facilitating using the identified clusters of attributes that matter most for learning and development.

There is a report identifying attributes of high quality leadership programs and how BrainReactions put these attributes into practice for their own innovation program and programs they develop for clients. Email Darin Eich at darin.eich@brainreactions.com for more information or to receive the report.

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Reaching GEN Y and keeping their attention is one of the greatest marketing mysteries of our generation. Young people today are very fickle and are constantly changing what they consider to be “cool” and “hip”. As a current summer camp counselor and college student, I have had the chance to experience this up, close and personal. It is quite amazing that the amount of knowledge our young people today have on current culture, products, and lifestyle. That is very important to remember when marketing to GEN Y — never take them for granted or assume they are not capable of understanding complex situations or products. GEN Y is one of the smartest, tech savvy and idealistic generations of our time. They know what they want, but they do not always know how to get there, and that is where market research, focus groups, BrainReactions brainstorms, and other tools come in handy. It is important to not just understand the wants, likes, and dislikes of GEN Y, but also who they are and where they want to be in the future. The youth of today love to discuss themselves and they want to the world to know they are here to stay. Our generation has grown up knowing mostly that as long as they dream big and work hard they can achieve and get anything they want. Now, that is a tough group to create for and sell to, but with the amount of money GEN Y controls, either their own or their parent’s, companies cannot make the mistake of not listening and understanding their concerns.

GEN Y is always searching for the next big tech item, clothes, shoes, etc. to jump unto and call their own. Youth of today love the idea of interchangeable products, such as multiple shoe designs, backpacks that do more than just hold books, and they are very primitive to the art of multi-tasking, more so than past generations. They are used to playing XBOX, doing their homework, chatting and texting w/friends, and planning their schedule for the next day better than the best of us. Due to the globalization of our culture and economy, companies cannot wait for their competition to create the next big thing — being on the cutting edge of product research and development is vital to the growth and expansion of products/services marketed towards GEN Y. There are truly no perfect ways to keep the attention of GEN Yers, but there are some techniques that can be utilized to increase outreach and interest of youth in a company’s products or services. Along with these eight techniques, I would also like to say the most important way to learn from and market to GEN Y is to simply listen to them. They want to be heard, but they do not always have an applicable outlet to have their voices, ideas, and concerns heard. Your company’s future can be bright when it comes to targeting GEN Y, but only if you show GEN Y that you are ready to open up and listen to them.

1. Utilizing Buzz Marketing/Word of Mouth Marketing: Young people are very open and vocal about a product or service they see as useful and innovative and will not hesitate a bit to tell their friends. Buzz marketing can be a commercial that a GEN Yer saw on TV/Youtube that was hilarious and it had some memorable slogan or quote, or it could be an interesting product name, or it could be totally something created in a GEN Yers mind from personal use of that product or service.

2. Creating fresh and innovative products or services: GEN Yers were born in a generation where new products/services are created everyday. Everything from iPods to clothing. GEN Yers expect unique creations that stretch their imaginations to new heights and offer the creativity of new technologies we are used to seeing and envisioning in our everyday lives. GEN Yers also expect simplicity of use and function, but at the same time something out of this world!

3. Make Our Lives Easier: GEN Yers expect products/services that make our hectic lives a little less fast and more relaxing and organized. GEN Yers are used to working, going to classes, and being super involved in school clubs & sports, all at the same time. In addition, anything created to make things more integrated is a plus. That could be a music player that has a scheduler/calendar or a cell phone that is also a picture taker and moviemaker. GEN Yers expect multi-function capabilities in almost any new product created aimed at our generation.

4. Attach Product/Service to a good cause: GEN Yers love companies that help good causes. Most young people volunteer according to recent studies and are more attracted to companies who have the same giving philosophy. When they know that by buying a pair of new shoes or clothing, part of the proceeds go to an important charity, they are more likely to purchase from that store and the opposite is true for companies who do not engage in charitable causes. GEN Yers care about helping those less fortunate and expect the same ideals from companies they spend their money on.

5. Style/Image Branding: Style and image are everything when it comes to product buying by GEN Yers. If a new product or service is not deemed cool or something they can tell their friends about the next day, then that product has lost a chance to make that very important first impact on a young person. GEN Yers can either be brand loyal or fickle, so companies must regularly ensure that the way they design and package new products fit in the realm of what GEN Yers expect. GEN Yers expect sharp, creative, and innovative styles and creations.

6. Advertise/Market Where GEN Yers Are: Most young people spend countless hours and days in front of their computer, at the mall, and in the movies. So placing ads before popular youth market films will reach the GEN Y audience very well. It is important that any ads speak the language of young people. Young people feel more comfortable seeing ads with actors that can relate to their age group. Unique and funny ads are essential for creating buzz for a new product or service and giving something young people can tell their friends about. In addition, advertising in popular youth magazines is a vital way to reach the GEN Y market. Furthermore, most GEN Yers have computers and access to the Internet, so advertising and collaborating with popular youth sites, like MTV.com, is an awesome way to reach the GEN Y market.

7. Street Teams/Peer-to-Peer Marketing: This is one of the best ways to reach GEN Yers. GEN Yers trust what their peers have to say, more than they do someone not their age. Street teams are an awesome way to rally youth around a new product or service and to get young people excited and engaged. It is important to ensure potential youth buyers trust the messenger. Young people are very smart and intelligent and can smell a fake ad or message a million miles away. Once a company loses that trust factor, it is very hard to regain that customer back. Street teams also are a good away to initiate buzz marketing.

8. Innovation/Incentives: Its important that a company marketing products/services to GEN Y consistently come out with new and innovative products on a regularly basis. GEN Yers expect continued new ideas and inventions on a regular basis, considering that we are used to such happenings from birth. GEN Yers also respond well to incentives, discounts, and free stuff. By utilizing a combination of those or all three, your company is sure to create a good initial buzz and interest in what you are trying to sell.

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It seems that its about time for me to weigh in again about the sorry state of marketing geared to Gen Y individuals. Granted, I can be a very judgmental individual, but there are so few really quality marketing campaigns out there that I often find myself telling my friends that there needs to be a group that has to approve all marketing campaigns and ads to save us from having to watch some of the truly awful ones.

On that note, I’d like to propose an option for companies looking to market to Gen Y and college students. Marketing firms should be making use of the internet to put together focus groups who watch the ad campaigns via streaming video or evaluate print ads on some website. By mining the data on social websites like Facebook and MySpace, companies could identify individuals that they want to be part of the focus group and invites could be sent to those individuals with a promise of compensation for participating.

I’m sure there must be online focus groups already in operation, but aside from using the social websites to identify individuals to take part in the group, my other innovation for this undertaking would incorporate a device to monitor physiological responses from the individual watching the ad. I remember a West Wing episode in which a focus group watching Bartlett giving a state of the union address were monitored using a simple dial that they adjusted in response to what Bartlett was saying. A simple extension of this approach would be a device that is shipped to the individual in the focus group. The group members would hook this device up to a USB port on their computer and before watching the ad, they would place their hand on the device, which would measure electrical and physiological responses to the ad. A baseline could be taken by also showing the group members ad campaigns that the company thinks are ones they either want to emulate or not emulate.

This approach would allow marketing firms to reach the ever so important Gen Y demographic in a very controlled manner and would also provide more information than they would get from a simple form that group members would also fill out after watching the ad campaign.

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I just read a rather interesting article on Pitchfork Media.

Its basically a comparison of the presence of Star Wars and the continent of Africa on the internet and asks the question “are the denziens of the net more involved in an imaginary world than the real world?” I’ll leave it to you to peruse the article, but it got me to thinking about what role corporations and websites hosting some of the prominent web 2.0 sites should play in shaping the debate and the information out there on social issues.

Ideally, I’d like to see websites and corporations innovating with services and products that encourage the consumer to learn more about the world and to get involved while still remaining appealing. I’d be intrigued if Wikipedia, for instance, devoted a sidebar on the page to some current world topic and had links to organizations where you could learn more or get involved. There are a ton of opportunities out there for corporations to increase their social credibility and still maintain a strong marketing and product presence.

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I am not sure why there is not something more on a local level that better connects businesses with college students with specific attention paid to the interests of the college student. I am envisioning a web-service that allows local business people to post specials by the hour according to the student preference. For example, if a local bar was barely receiving any business on a particular night they could post on the website that they were having a three-hour special of all you could drink beer for $X. This would allow for the bar to better control their flow of customers in a bar while giving the students an excellent value and option for the night.

Another use for this application would be to better control inventory in a store or restaurant. If I am the owner of a clothing store and I just got in the new shipment of clothes and had a bunch of leftovers, I could post on the website that I had these available sizes and it would get posted on the website.

For the actual model of the website, think a combination of http://jellyfish.com and http://digg.com. Jellyfish.com is a website which has a selling feature where an item has to go and the price gets lowered by the minute until the item is sold out. The website could have the option for such an auction of an item, but it would be on more of a local scale and might require the user to actually go to the store in their local area. It would relate to Digg.com by allowing user input to say whether this was a good deal or not, bad deals would get ‘buried’ and would not be shown to other users (which would address the issues of just using the website as an advertisement) while good deals would get pulled to the top for the user.

This service does not need to be limited to college students, but I know that as a member of Gen Y that the idea would be well perceived over the internet or a desktop widget because of the massive amount of hours that we spend connected to the internet. These are just some thoughts on a service that could be used to better connect students with businesses. Most of these thoughts are rough, but the underlying concept of having a service that better connects businesses to college students by advertising to their direct interests is something that could be very successful while benefiting the customer and businesses.

No Comments | Generation-Y wants, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, New Concepts & Ideas, Managing Generation Y | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Generation Y, thanks to the advent of the internet and high-speed telecommunications technology is the first generation that has the ability to lend their expertise to anyone in the world. Gen Y, I would also like to think, is very aware of the difficult situations faced by many people throughout the world, especially in developing countries. Many of us have unique and valuable skill sets that would be of use to people throughout the world, and for the first time, we have the ability to connect to those people without having to travel.

What I envision is a kind of virtual peace corps. Gen Y individuals volunteer their time to connect and lend their expertise to projects or people in developing worlds by either chatting, video conferencing, or sending documents over the internet with worthy projects in the developing world (or even here in America - New Orleans for example). I envision some charitable-minded companies taking the lead on this, Apple or Microsoft providing some of the resources, and an airline too. By logging a certain number of volunteer hours on a project, the volunteer is rewarded with airline miles to either take a trip to the project they’ve been helping out with (encouraged) or to a place of their choosing.

Something like this would really open up a world of opportunities to people who maybe don’t have the ability or the inclination to take part in something like the peace corps, but still allows them to help out. I think it would also greatly improve a sense of a world community to help break down the walls of nationalist thinking.

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The Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky posted an interesting article recently highlighting the challenges the financial industry is facing in terms of hiring and retaining Gen Y talent. With thousands of workers retiring in the next decade, firms are struggling to find young employees to replace these retirees. A report referenced in the article stated that the loss of such talent is “arguably the ’single most concerning impediment to long-term sustainable growth’ in the industry.” The article further claims that many companies do not have plans in place to address these issues. Deloitte anticipates banks needing to fill approximately one million teller positions over the next decade. However, the Gen Y employees are aiming to have a much different career and lifestyle goals than their predecessors, including wanting a tech-savvy work environment, flexible working conditions, and long-term development programs. Is your company ready for the retirement of baby-boomers? How is your organization going to compete for scarce young talent?

For more information and ideas on this topic, visit www.YInnovateHR.com/papers

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What is innovation without people? Better said, how can an organization innovate without great people? Jonathan Vehar recently blogged about a presentation he saw featuring the founder of the Motorola RAZR wireless phone. A message from this presentation was that innovation is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. Innovation is a way to better meet customer needs, and as a result, drive profits for a company. Key to the innovation process is people - individuals who can understand customer needs, develop creative ideas to meet those needs, and implement their ideas in a beneficial way.

What policies and procedures does your organization have in place to develop, retain, and reward your most innovative employees? How can you help to develop and empower all of your employees to be more innovative? In an increasingly competitive labor (and business) environment, what will you do to set apart your organization as an employer of choice for the most innovative people?

For more information and ideas on this topic, visit www.YInnovateHR.com.

Jonathan Vehar’s blog on this subject can be found here.

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