Why “engagement” in social media is not enough.

For those of us marketers who have been involved with social media (SM) efforts the past few years, we have all read articles/attended conferences/conferred with SM professionals who drink from the well of “engagement” as being the main metric to look at in gauging the success of SM efforts. Respectfully, my perspective is that to make this the sole determinant of your SM efforts short-sheets the bed. Particularly in the healthcare delivery space.

SM initiatives continue to struggle with justification of business case, in much the same way other marketing efforts do. The difference typically is that many of those other marketing efforts are much more established (e.g., TV spots). It’s not to say they are always effective, just more effectively known to marketers.

But going back to pegging your SM aspirations to “engagement”, let’s try and look at things a bit more broadly. St. Claire Group looks at SM outcomes along this continuum:

Engagement —-→ Advocacy —-→ Transaction

Let’s use a couple of examples to draw the distinction between Engagement and Advocacy.

Jim lands on a blog about surgical weight loss, sponsored by a local hospital. Jim’s friend Sam, who laments and struggles with obesity, might be interested in this information, thinks Jim. So he sends Sam an email containing a weblink to the site, along with a message saying “Thought this might be of interest.”

This is a classic example of Engagement.

But using the same example, what if Jim sent Sam the same weblink, but because of the confidence he feels in the local hospital’s program, his message reads something like this: “Hey Sam, I know you’ve been looking into programs like this, but this one from St. Z Hospital really looks like a winner.”

Now we have advocacy.

And with Advocacy, if the balance of your online strategies are interconnected and congruent, getting to the Transaction sequence in healthcare delivery is an obtainable reality.

In our next posting, we’ll talk about instances where the Advocacy stage can be bypassed, taking hospital SM initiatives right to Transaction.