The Money Is Where Engagement Meets Satisfaction Online

This post completes a discussion I started in Meet Online Engagement's Little Friend, Satisfaction and hinted at in Back into the fray comes Joseph!. I want to pick up at "The only place where engagement and satisfaction look like the old XY plots you learned in high school geometry are when both are zero. This is because the only time you can be neither satisfied nor dissatisfied is when you're completely not engaged. The moment you become engaged in something -- whether positive or negative -- you're going to be either satisfied or dissatisfied by the experience.
"Similarly, the moment you become either satisfied or dissatisfied by something you'll be engaged by it either positively or negatively." Mapping this figure to real world experience, you always want visitors/consumer/etc to be in the green. People are both positively engaged (they like what’s going on) and positively satisfied (they accept it gladly). Depending on what you’re selling you may or may not want people in those other quadrants. The bottom yellow indicates someone rejecting pleasure, the top yellow indicates someone who enjoys pain and the red curve is where visitors/consumers/etc often end up and marketers/businesses don’t want them to be — they don't like a product or service and are actively rejecting it.

How Does One Use This?

Let's start with "Engagement only tells you where and if someone's attention is focused. on something". The chart on the right shows Engagement over a 30 day period for a site NextStage monitors. What we're actually measuring are the amount of cognitive resources the average visitor is using to internalize the information on the page. That's science-speak for "People are focusing their attention on it". The more they focus the higher the value.

Knowing that some is engaged is not necessarily enough. Drive down the highway late for a meeting and see a police car up ahead, the police officer out with a radar gun aimed right at you. I'll bet you're completely engaged by that police officer and not in a positive way. So what does our chart look like when you add in whether the average visitor was positively or negatively engaged? Like the chart on the right.

This chart is the same time span as the above and is based on the same data, we're simply adding a field -- positive or negative -- to engagement. Most times you'd want people positively engaged by your site, brand, product, service, tv show, print material, ... Everything above the 0 line corresponds to the green and bottom yellow sections of the XY area plot above, everything below the 0 line corresponds to the top yellow and red sections of the XY area plot above.

Now let's add Satisfaction -- are visitors accepting or rejecting of your brand, site, information, product, service, ... This is shown in the figure on the right. You can determine if someone or some group are positively or negatively engaged. The green, yellow and red filled areas correspond to the green, yellow and red quadrants of the XY area plot above.

And here's where the money is

Look at Engagement and Satisfaction charted as above and you should notice some periodicity. What that periodicity depends on is beyond the scope of this column. However, that periodicity can often be linked to sales cycles (online, offline, mixed, it truly depends on the kind of business you're in). What the last chart above gives you is a near surgical ability to recreate optimal satisfaction-engagement periods at will.

So are you experiencing periodicity in good, bad or ugly online and/or offline activity? Now you can control any and all of it.

Enjoy.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Links for this post:

• Attention, Engagement and Trust: The Internet Trinity and Websites

• Ad:Tech Chicago 5-6 Aug 08

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