From TheFutureOf (7 Nov 08): Debbie Pascoe asked me to pontificate on “What are we measuring when we measure ‘engagement’?”

Debbie Pascoe emailed me a while back, asking “…when you talk about “engagement” and measuring it, what is it that should be measured? I don’t mean the variables, etc to collect specific data points. Rather, it has to do with motivation. Someone comes to the site and we want to whether/know they are engaged……engaged to do what? What are the variables measuring? How will we know if/ when we’ve answered the question?

We’re not all the same, so my engagement is your time-waster. I don’t know if I’ve made the question clear enough for your response. If not, let me know and I can provide more clarity.”

Whoa. Great question, Debbie. To answer with any attempt at clarity will take a bit of detail, so go get a coffee or whatever suits you, sit back, relax, take a deep breath and let’s begin (and remember, I’m explaining based on the types of research NextStage does and may not be what you’re asking about)…

Internal v External Objects

You’re reading this blog post. This blog post is an external object to you. Perhaps it’s on a screen or you’ve printed it out. This external object has certain properties that can be defined/recognized as system variables. These system variables are defined by the blog publishing system, your computer settings, which browser/reader you’re using, … these things are obvious.

Historically not obvious (except to us at NextStage and people in related disciplines, anyway) is that system variables also include things like font size, color, images, placement, content, amount of content, positioning, …

All these system variables are variables of the external object. These variables can be measured independently by various devices and will all be the same ±2db.

As you interact with this blog post in whatever external form you’ve chosen, you start to create an internal representation of it. This internal representation is comprised of estimator variables. Some of these estimator variables include things like your attitude towards me (the author of this post), whether or not I use colors that you have personal biases to, whether or not I use colors that your demographic has biases to, your gender (sorry to say gender is not a binary issue, folks. Neurologically, humans are not “male or female”. We may favor one neurologic gender when considering an amalgam of all thoughts in a given time period or situation, and we switch back and forth, mix and match as needs and environment dictate), your emotional state when you read this, …

System variables and the external objects they represent are interesting, definitely. You want to know about engagement, though? You need to understand the estimator variables and the internal object, the conscious and non-conscious sum that becomes the internal representation of the external object you’re interacting with.

<ASIDE>
and people wonder why, when asked, I tell people that NextStage researches “how people interact with information in their environment”
</ASIDE>

You are also quite correct when you write “…my engagement is your time-waster.”

Consider all the possible estimator variables involved, the order they’re in in a given calculation (arithmetic associativity and commutativity don’t apply in neuromathematics because biases cascade rather than lineate. Humans don’t respond to stimuli in fixed manners except in the massive aggregate. Even so, assuming a massed aggregate means you’re only capturing what’s allowed by your error margin. Allowing for estimator variables equates to decreasing your error margin to an infinitesimal, therefore your capture becomes infinite.

<ASIDE>
this is why I often talk about probability solids and solid probabilities and hyperspatial systems when describing the math NextStage uses in its models
</ASIDE>

Can we measure “engagement”?

So what we’re left with is “Can we measure that someone is engaged?”

Yes, we can (remember, I’m talking about how NextStage defines “engagement” and our measurement methodologies, using our technology).

Then what are we measuring?

We’re measuring the estimator variables to determine that a very specific neurologic process is active in the given individual (ditto the above).

What is that “very specific neurologic process”?

A focusing of attention such that non-conscious and conscious activities at least intersect if not momentarily synchronize (see Attention, Engagement and Trust: The Internet Trinity and Websites, Defining Attention on Websites & Blogs, Know Your Audience, and Reach It, Focusing Your Customer’s Attention, Get the attention you’re already paying for or Defining Engagement (Again? Oh, Lordy!) and Exploring the Holes in Flawed Logic. We also have some for-pay whitepapers defining these things, how we measure them, case studies, research, etc., if anybody’s interested).

Note that nothing in the definitions thus far concerns itself with the system variables of the external object. We don’t care about them right now.

Because we don’t care about them right now, we don’t have to worry about “…my engagement is your time-waster.” because we don’t care what is engaging you, only that the neurologic processes of engagement are being demonstrated (see Modality-Specific Attention Under Imminent But Not Remote Threat of Shock: Evidence From Differential Prepulse Inhibition of Startle, Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research, Social Decision-Making: Insights from Game Theory and Neuroscience, … There’s 103 references in the NextStage library from sources such as Science, Nature, Neuroscience, Refereed Proceedings of the International Women’s Conference, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, The Journal of Neuroscience, … have I lost anybody yet? And that was just a quick search. Knock yourself out and do a search for “attentional control” or “focused attention” (although there’s a lot more trash around the latter)).

So it doesn’t matter what’s ‘engaging’ someone, only that they’re demonstrating “engagement’?

Quite correct. What’s engaging to you may not be engaging to me and vice versa (at least let’s hope not, yes?). But (!!!) the way you and I demonstrate ‘engagement’ will be the same ±2db (so to speak). The fact that you and I and all humans demonstrate ‘engagement’ in some very specific ways (”Engagement is the demonstration of Attention via psychomotor activity that serves to focus an individual’s Attention.“) is critical to the next part of this discussion.

You and I and just about everyone else can look at someone and tell whether they’re “engaged” (focusing their attention) in what they’re doing. We don’t even have to see what they’re doing in order to know if they’re “engaged” in what they’re doing. We can tell by the look on their face, their breathing, their lack of response to other external stimuli, …, that someone is focusing their attention to the exclusion of other stimuli. IE, the intersection of their non-conscious (breathing, the look on their face, etc) and conscious (what they’re actually aware they’re doing (and we’ll need to come back to “aware” in a moment or two)) is occuring and pretty much without pause.

Here’s an interesting (to me) aspect of engagement; if someone can tell you what they’re doing when you ask them then their level of engagement is either very low or non-existent, meaning “they’re not engaged”.

This means that if you ask someone what they’re doing and they respond immediately — let’s say they’re looking at some websites and you say “What are you doing?” and they immediately respond “I’m looking up something” then they’re not engaged in what they’re doing because they were able to respond to a stimulus that wasn’t part of the original external object – internal object pair (<ASIDE>this is one of the ways ET can determine if someone was on the phone, listening to music, watching tv, petting their dog, talking to someone else, etc., while browsing</ASIDE>).

However, if you ask someone a question and it takes them a moment or two to respond? Then they were engaged. Did they sigh before they responded? They were more engaged. Did they have to physically pull away from what they were doing? By golly they were engaged. Did you have to tap them or shout or something to get their attention (ask Susan about this)? Then my god were they engaged.

IE, if someone is aware of what they’re doing then they’re not engaged in what they’re doing.

“Engagement” happens in the “now”, not over time, not in the future and not in the past

People can focus their attention on things not in their environment. They do so by bringing whatever isn’t in their immediate external environment into their immedate mental environment. Top performance athletes do this when they mentally rehearse their game or event. Are they engaged? Definitely and they are engaged “right now”, they are focusing their present time attention on some future event, they aren’t focusing their future attention on the future. If the latter were true, you could interrupt their musings in the present and they would respond immediately, then some time in the future and without stimulus they’d look up suddenly and ask, “What?”

The fact that engagement is very much a “now” phenomenon plays into the concept of motivation.

So “motivation” is important to engagement?

Ah, we’re getting closer to the key, me thinks.

Yes, motivation is important because people must be motivated (in the process of creating an “internal-external congruency”. Motivation is demonstrated when the external environment is altered through the direct action of the individual in order to achieve some internally recognized goal or objective) to be engaged by what they’re doing. Motivation is one of those things I reference when discussing the {C,B/e,M} matrix (see From TheFutureOf (22 Jan 08): Starting the discussion: Attention, Engagement, Authority, Influence, … and From TheFutureOf (16 Jul 08): Responses to Geertz, Papadakis and others, 5 Feb 08 for more on this). Understanding what motivates people — how much effort they are willing to demonstrate in order to externalize an internal goal or objective — is a part of knowing how to engage them, ie how to focus their attention where we want their attention focused.

Let me give you an example of motivation: I want to play guitar well enough to be able to sit down with musicians and keep up with them. To do that, I must practice playing guitar. I do, and will often go into our music room and just play for 5-10 minutes during the day besides my usual practice time.

The internal goal/objective is a certain level of musicianship. The external recognition of that goal/objective is playing with musicians and keeping up with them. The effort demonstrated is daily practice. Lots of people want to play guitar, few people want to practice daily. We colloquialize this with “They’re not motivated enough” and what we’re recognizing is that the internal goal/objective doesn’t have sufficient value to warrant the effort involved (a Fair-Exchange concept if ever there was one).

Then we can motivate them to be engaged in what we want them to do? How?

People may have heard or read my description of what NextStage does as essentially creating an equation, A + B = C (see Troublesome Targets: Where Analytics and Audiences Meet). I normally describe this equation as “The visitor + the marketing material = the desired response.”

Now let’s get a bit more technical. The “The visitor + the marketing material = the desired response” is another form of “(Estimator variables defining Internal Object) + (System Variables defining External Object) = (Are they engaged or not?)”.

This restating of the simple equation is important because it provides definable, executable solutions to questions such as “What background color increases attention to a branding image/message?” The “What background color increases attention to a branding image/message?” is a semantic variation of “(increases attention) + (background color) = (branding image/message)”.

Marketers, advertisers, whomever, knows they want “C”, increased branding of their product in the consumer’s mind. They also know they have “B”, some background color palette. If “C” doesn’t occur then “A”, increased attention, hasn’t happened because the choice of “B” was an incorrect choice, ie “B” wasn’t motivating visitors to demonstrate “A”, engagement.

To me (to me!!!) the value of measuring engagement as defined here is that the site owner knows now, almost immediately, if “B” is working in real time and will work or not pre-publication. Because we can measure “A” and we know “B”, we can tell how “B” needs to be changed in order to produce the desired “C”. The true richness of that “A + B = C” formulation is that it understands “A = S_if_i(S_j(x_j))”, etc., so that you can be near surgical in determining what exactly (and I do mean exactly) needs to be changed in order to produce the desired result “C”.

So to “Someone comes to the site and we want to whether/know they are engaged……engaged to do what? What are the variables measuring? How will we know if/ when we’ve answered the question?”

A + B = C -> (they are engaged) + (the site) = (to do what?)

• If you can describe what you want someone to do (”C”) and
• You know what the demonstrations of engagement are for your selected audience (”A”) then
• You can determine what the site (”B”) needs to be in order for “A” to happen such that “C” occurs.

What are the variables measuring? About 80 different psychomotor behaviors at present. More in the future, we hope.

How will we know if/when we’ve answered the question? Near immediately, depending on traffic volume, how well you’ve defined your target audience and things like that.

Pre-publication knowledge falls from the above by holding C and A constant, thus determining what modifications (if any) are required to B in order to create equality.

(pant pant pant)

The last thing Debbie wrote me was “I look forward to your pontification on this issue.”

Okay, Debbie. How’d I do?