The 5 C's of Engagement

Creating the strategy and harnessing the power of new digital rules with the intent of driving measurable operational benefits from social media/social leadership is a monumental task in itself. To make this chore a little less grueling and, specifically in relationship to blogs, PostRank, base their metrics on what has been termed the 5 C’s of Engagement. 

1.    Creating
2.    Critiquing
3.    Chatting
4.    Collecting
5.    Clicking

About these 5 C’s, Maddie Grant writes, “…I really like the last “Clicking” category because that really could include the actions (e.g. reading, saving (not on social bookmarking sites but for personal use) etc. that are things that 90% (from the 1:9:90 rule) of online users do – which are actually really important and often overlooked. Those lurkers still have a level of engagement that can result in ROI – they may not be doing some of the more engaged social actions ONLINE, but they are reading and may well be doing more talking, participating and attending OFFLINE, as a result of things they see online, than we traditionally give them credit for. Clicking could even contain very measurable actions like registering/RSVP’ing for an event, or downloading a white paper, or buying something from your online store.

So what’s the point of all this? Well, I almost answered my own question in my last sentence above. You could apply the 5 C’s to all kinds of social media spaces, not just blogs. I think when you’re trying to figure out metrics for measuring engagement, it can’t hurt to start by dropping all the actions you can think of into the 5 C’s framework. Think about this in terms of specific social media projects. What might be in the 5 C’s when you’re thinking about your Facebook page? What about your online community? What about your event-specific site?

Once you’ve gone through that exercise, you can potentially start to see how to rank actions based on how much effort is involved (as per the existing ranking of the 5 C’s) in order to give a good overall snapshot of the activity of your project – and then measure all of that against your objectives. You can also start to use this framework to set a baseline benchmark, for ongoing measurement to see your progress over time.  I think the issue everyone is struggling with in terms of developing a framework for measuring engagement is that we’re not quite sure what we need to measure nor how to rank line items that we’re measuring once we come up with a list. The 5 C’s of engagement seems to me to be a simple way to start doing that.”

No doubt, blogging is a vital communications vehicle, and the five C’s of Engagement  applied specifically to your blogging could prove to be a very positive action all the way around. Why not try it and let us know your results?