From TheFutureOf (22 Jan 08): Starting the discussion: Attention, Engagement, Authority, Influence, …

Okay. Something controversial to start.

The only problem is that to me what I’m offering isn’t controversial. It deals with measures and measuring.

Measuring what?

Well, when you put some Flash object on a page. What can you measure? I’m not a web analyst so to me the answers are obvious; measure the psychomotive and psychobehavioral cues that visitors are demonstrating. These and other elements are what make up the Cognitive, Behavioral/effective, Motivational matrix or “{C,B/e,M}”. The {C,B/e,M} tells you things like age, gender, buying styles, best branding strategies, impact ratios, touch factors, education level, income level, …

I understand that not everybody finds these things fascinating. Anthropologists, behavioral and cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists, sociologists, behavioral etymologists, …, those kinds of people go nuts over this kind of stuff.

Some of the stuff listed above has to do with things like attention, engagement, authority, influence, …

This is where it gets a little…umm…interesting. I see words like the above used a lot in web and web based “behavioral” analytics. This is a mystery to me. Much in the same way that an anthropologist and a microbiologist use the term “culture” to mean two very different things, I think the way web analysts and web-based behavioral analysts use the terms attention, engagement, authority, influence, … to mean two sets of very different things. I’ve often commented and written that behavioral tracking as defined by the industry doesn’t track human behaviors at all. Not as I understand them, anyway.

Okay, so what do I mean by these things? To recycle content from Attention, Engagement and Trust: The Internet Trinity and Websites:

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Attention is a behavior that demonstrates specific neural activity is taking place.

Engagement is the demonstration of Attention via psychomotor activity that serves to focus an individual’s Attention.

I’ll add in Trust because NextStage is often asked to determine if people find marketing material — websites, brochures, etc. — trustworthy:
Trust is what the consumer — well informed or not — gives the site (or whatever is asking for the consumer’s Attention) when their Engagement is rewarded with useful, relevant and meaningful information.

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I can go into authority (something fellow SNCR member John Cass caused me to explore and which I’ll be publishing about soon) and influence. I know how to measure what I mean by these things. But the definition I use don’t come from the web world even though what I mean by them can be measured through any number of commonly used web-enabled devices.

And while I’m not sure, I don’t think my definitions are those used in web analytics and web-based behavioral analytics. What I can offer is that my definitions — and this is my opinion here — are more closely aligned to what is generally understood in the literature (in the disciplines I mentioned above) than what is meant by web analysts and web-based behavioral analysts. I’m not equating “close alignment with literature” with “more valid”, merely offering that different paradigms can offer more understanding than any single paradigm alone.

But right now I think I’ve gone on enough. I came here to learn. I’d really much rather hear what others think, understand what they measure and what value they assign to it.

So for me the real questions are:

1. What do you mean by the terms used here?
2. Can you repeatedly measure what you mean by them so that there’s a reasonable surety that what you’re measuring is what you mean by the terms you’ve used?
3. Can you make these measurements through a commonly used web-enabled device?

Links for this post:

• Attention, Engagement and Trust: The Internet Trinity and Websites
• Get the attention you’re already paying for
• Defining Attention on Websites & Blogs
• Focusing Your Customer’s Attention
• Expertise – Who Decides?