6 ms·

All I've heard for the past 12+ years is "engagement". The singular focus on that one word to the exclusion of everything else is astounding to me. As if it i

All I've heard for the past 12+ years is "engagement". The singular focus on that one word to the exclusion of everything else is astounding to me. As if it is some magic incantation on the part of BizDev (or whatever they're called these days) that instantly transmogrifies users into profits. At one company I worked at, we had a digital product that was part of a suite of services our company provided. It was useful to our customers but it's clear, if you see it, that they want to get in, get done what they need to do, and get out. It's a tool to help them do their jobs and nothing more. You'd think that simplicity and efficiency would be celebrated. The number of times I heard "engagement" and "gamification" used about that product from the marketing team, however... Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears. I should note that, we didn't make any more money the longer someone spent on that product. There was no advertising model associated with it--it is a per-seat hosted solution. So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing!

KhoomeiK 5y ago
> So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing! "Cargo cult marketing"?
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Fads are a sociological information-theoretic emergent dynamic. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothing_music_diets_art_management_theory_fad_as/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...
asteroidbelt 5y ago
> we didn't make any more money the longer someone spent on that product. There was no advertising model associated with it--it is a per-seat hosted solution. Are you sure that time spent on product does not affect sales? E. g. is it possible that if people don't spend time with product, they will renew the subscription next year? > So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing! Perhaps it is the issue of the marketing department of that organization is that their bonuses are not tied to any performance metrics. In proper organizations (like Google) marketing director get paid if their marketing efforts give the company more revenue than the company spends on marketing, and fired otherwise.
- Zelphyr 5y ago
  > Are you sure that time spent on product does not affect sales? It may have, but not dramatically. The product wasn't what we were known for. Customers came to us for other services that we were known for (and, I should add, this company is very good at what they do) and this digital product sold as a sort-of upsell. > Perhaps it is the issue of the marketing department of that organization is that their bonuses are not tied to any performance metrics. I don't know for sure, not having any insight into that part of the business, but knowing that company I would bet you are right.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > E. g. is it possible that if people don't spend time with product, they will renew the subscription next year? For most tools (and the GP does make it seem to be the case), usage count is roughly correlated with added value, and time/usage to added cost. So, are you asking if total time spent on it is correlated with added value? Well, maybe. You are just making a very bad question, and may get any random answer. If you are using this as a metric, all the easy ways to increase it add costs, not value.
scotty79 5y ago
When you are in finances I think you hear "money" quite often.
- musicale 5y ago
  Which makes it even more puzzling that marketing would insist on something that burns the company's money and the customer's money with zero (or negative) benefit.
m_ke 5y ago
We got to pitch a bunch of top VCs for a (wellness/health) consumer app that we were building and it made me really sick that the only thing that they cared about was engagement. DAU/MAU, time spent in app and growth were the only things that mattered.
dkarl 5y ago
Marketing contributes to decisions about what features to build next, and they use engagement to vindicate their recommendations. They also use engagement to brag about the success of your products and new features within your products when trying to drum up interest in your company's offerings.
monocasa 5y ago
> Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears. Considering how hard it is to find decent, non-smart appliances these days, it seems to have fell on deaf ears at LG as well.
- musicale 5y ago
  "Look how many hours our users spend watching Netflix on our new refrigerator and using our connected mobile fridge app!"
- grishka 5y ago
  At least you could buy a smart appliance but never give it an internet connection. It would most probably still perform its main function just fine.
abraae 5y ago
In a similar vein, I've discussed with customers why it's not a good idea to slavishly follow conversions, in our case on our hosted corporate careers site product. If job seekers are not well matched to a job, then we don't want them applying (i.e. a conversion)! That wastes everyone's time and good will. Instead, we want them to leave the process as quickly as possible. It's not unknown to have one person at the customer banging on about realistic job previews, to discourage unsuitable candidates as soon as possible ("if you take this job, you'll be standing and lifting boxes in the warehouse for 5 hours a day"), while someone else is banging on about why/how the site's conversion rate could be increased.
- hinkley 5y ago
  There's a point though, where you are telegraphing perfectly good reasons someone would not want to work for you while they are desperate to fill positions even if it means tricking people into working there.
- jpadkins 5y ago
  one could argue that your conversions are not defined well enough. Define conversion as a qualified lead. Or define conversion as a job application that results in a callback. Then you can go back to obsessing over conversions :-) Not enough people push back when a bad KPI is set.
  - abraae 5y ago
    It's a fair point, but really best practice would be to class a conversion as someone who applied for the job, was successful, and then performed at a high level for the next two years. Not practical for many reasons and hard to convey to someone hunched over their Google analytics dashboard.
musicale 5y ago
> Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears. This is brilliant; too bad your marketing department was apparently run by broken robots.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. LG's business model is to earn a one off payment by selling an appliance. It doesn't earn any incremental payment each time a consumer accesses the appliance. Facebook and Google have different models. They sell ads each time a consumer engages with their products. To change the behaviour of people who work at Google and Facebook, first think of a way for them to get paid more if they make the changes you want. Then, get their attention with your message and hope they listen and obey you. If you don't get their attention the first time, try again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. That's how advertising works.
Stratoscope 5y ago
I hate "engagement". I am a weird person. When I used to go to a movie theater, I stayed and watched the credits at the end. There would be some closing music, and maybe a few outtakes. It was always interesting to see how many people it took to make a movie and what they all did. A nice way to unwind and acknowledge everyone who created the movie. Lately I've been watching The Sopranos on Amazon. As soon as the end credits roll, a "Next Episode" box pops up in the corner and I am in a race against time to click the teeny Cancel button. I think they give me five whole seconds before auto-starting the next episode. It pisses me off every time! If I were Tony Soprano, I'd be tempted to hit that corner of the screen with a pointed heavy object just to make it stop haunting me: "You really want to watch the next episode right now. You do NOT want to sit quietly and enjoy the end credits and the cool music the showrunner chose." But then I would have to buy a new monitor, so I restrain myself. This "engagement" makes me want to see a shrink.
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  I don’t use Amazon but some of the services I use even minify the video and put up a next video countdown — before the episode has ended. Probably the start of credits is automatically determined (guessed at) there based on percentage completed with a minimum absolute time. In any case - pretty annoying.
- tchalla 5y ago
  > Lately I've been watching The Sopranos on Amazon. As soon as the end credits roll, a "Next Episode" box pops up in the corner and I am in a race against time to click the teeny Cancel button. I think they give me five whole seconds before auto-starting the next episode. There should be a global setting to switch Autoplay Off in your settings.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    mpv will often allow that. This of course is predicated on a site supporting MPV, often meaning the content is independently downloadable, even if not officially. Industry's track record with user-specified anti-dark-pattern preferences (DNT, prefers-reduced-motion, etc.) is not encouraging.
suyash 5y ago
At my previous company the magic word was "consumption" and goal for everyone seem to be drive consumption of our services at any cost. Now you can understand what that would lead to. User preferences and best interest is generally last thing on everyone's mind.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Consumption just makes me think this person has tuberculosis.
hinkley 5y ago
Engagement is a number you can game. Makes me wonder if they have their 'gamification' and 'game theory' wires crossed.
elihu 5y ago
The thing that frustrates me about the idea of optimizing for engagement, is that the winning strategy seems to be to make the interface worse. If it's hard to navigate and find things, then people spend more time using the product. I assume that web developers have some techniques to determine whether people are spending more time on the site because it's legitimately useful and they're getting a lot of value out of it versus blundering around and not finding what they're looking for, but the whole idea of "engagement" seems like it could be summed up as "we don't think the distinction between those two things is important".
hanspeter 5y ago
> So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement Without arguing against that your marketing team was just following industry trends blindly, I would claim it's hard to imagine a product where increased engagement is not a benefit to the business. Being top-of-mind as a product and a brand is a big advantage, and even with no direct sale, ad revenue or referrals happening from the engagement, you will see increased conversions from word-of-mouth and increased resell/upsell on the product or associated products.

KhoomeiK 5y ago

> So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing! "Cargo cult marketing"?

dredmorbius 5y ago
Fads are a sociological information-theoretic emergent dynamic. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothing_music_diets_art_management_theory_fad_as/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...

asteroidbelt 5y ago

> we didn't make any more money the longer someone spent on that product. There was no advertising model associated with it--it is a per-seat hosted solution. Are you sure that time spent on product does not affect sales? E. g. is it possible that if people don't spend time with product, they will renew the subscription next year? > So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing! Perhaps it is the issue of the marketing department of that organization is that their bonuses are not tied to any performance metrics. In proper organizations (like Google) marketing director get paid if their marketing efforts give the company more revenue than the company spends on marketing, and fired otherwise.

Zelphyr 5y ago
> Are you sure that time spent on product does not affect sales? It may have, but not dramatically. The product wasn't what we were known for. Customers came to us for other services that we were known for (and, I should add, this company is very good at what they do) and this digital product sold as a sort-of upsell. > Perhaps it is the issue of the marketing department of that organization is that their bonuses are not tied to any performance metrics. I don't know for sure, not having any insight into that part of the business, but knowing that company I would bet you are right.
marcosdumay 5y ago
> E. g. is it possible that if people don't spend time with product, they will renew the subscription next year? For most tools (and the GP does make it seem to be the case), usage count is roughly correlated with added value, and time/usage to added cost. So, are you asking if total time spent on it is correlated with added value? Well, maybe. You are just making a very bad question, and may get any random answer. If you are using this as a metric, all the easy ways to increase it add costs, not value.

scotty79 5y ago

When you are in finances I think you hear "money" quite often.

musicale 5y ago
Which makes it even more puzzling that marketing would insist on something that burns the company's money and the customer's money with zero (or negative) benefit.

m_ke 5y ago

We got to pitch a bunch of top VCs for a (wellness/health) consumer app that we were building and it made me really sick that the only thing that they cared about was engagement. DAU/MAU, time spent in app and growth were the only things that mattered.

dkarl 5y ago

Marketing contributes to decisions about what features to build next, and they use engagement to vindicate their recommendations. They also use engagement to brag about the success of your products and new features within your products when trying to drum up interest in your company's offerings.

monocasa 5y ago

> Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears. Considering how hard it is to find decent, non-smart appliances these days, it seems to have fell on deaf ears at LG as well.

musicale 5y ago
"Look how many hours our users spend watching Netflix on our new refrigerator and using our connected mobile fridge app!"
grishka 5y ago
At least you could buy a smart appliance but never give it an internet connection. It would most probably still perform its main function just fine.

abraae 5y ago

In a similar vein, I've discussed with customers why it's not a good idea to slavishly follow conversions, in our case on our hosted corporate careers site product. If job seekers are not well matched to a job, then we don't want them applying (i.e. a conversion)! That wastes everyone's time and good will. Instead, we want them to leave the process as quickly as possible. It's not unknown to have one person at the customer banging on about realistic job previews, to discourage unsuitable candidates as soon as possible ("if you take this job, you'll be standing and lifting boxes in the warehouse for 5 hours a day"), while someone else is banging on about why/how the site's conversion rate could be increased.

hinkley 5y ago
There's a point though, where you are telegraphing perfectly good reasons someone would not want to work for you while they are desperate to fill positions even if it means tricking people into working there.
jpadkins 5y ago
one could argue that your conversions are not defined well enough. Define conversion as a qualified lead. Or define conversion as a job application that results in a callback. Then you can go back to obsessing over conversions :-) Not enough people push back when a bad KPI is set.
- abraae 5y ago
  It's a fair point, but really best practice would be to class a conversion as someone who applied for the job, was successful, and then performed at a high level for the next two years. Not practical for many reasons and hard to convey to someone hunched over their Google analytics dashboard.

musicale 5y ago

> Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears. This is brilliant; too bad your marketing department was apparently run by broken robots.

wombatmobile 5y ago
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. LG's business model is to earn a one off payment by selling an appliance. It doesn't earn any incremental payment each time a consumer accesses the appliance. Facebook and Google have different models. They sell ads each time a consumer engages with their products. To change the behaviour of people who work at Google and Facebook, first think of a way for them to get paid more if they make the changes you want. Then, get their attention with your message and hope they listen and obey you. If you don't get their attention the first time, try again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. That's how advertising works.

Stratoscope 5y ago

I hate "engagement". I am a weird person. When I used to go to a movie theater, I stayed and watched the credits at the end. There would be some closing music, and maybe a few outtakes. It was always interesting to see how many people it took to make a movie and what they all did. A nice way to unwind and acknowledge everyone who created the movie. Lately I've been watching The Sopranos on Amazon. As soon as the end credits roll, a "Next Episode" box pops up in the corner and I am in a race against time to click the teeny Cancel button. I think they give me five whole seconds before auto-starting the next episode. It pisses me off every time! If I were Tony Soprano, I'd be tempted to hit that corner of the screen with a pointed heavy object just to make it stop haunting me: "You really want to watch the next episode right now. You do NOT want to sit quietly and enjoy the end credits and the cool music the showrunner chose." But then I would have to buy a new monitor, so I restrain myself. This "engagement" makes me want to see a shrink.

Swenrekcah 5y ago
I don’t use Amazon but some of the services I use even minify the video and put up a next video countdown — before the episode has ended. Probably the start of credits is automatically determined (guessed at) there based on percentage completed with a minimum absolute time. In any case - pretty annoying.
tchalla 5y ago
> Lately I've been watching The Sopranos on Amazon. As soon as the end credits roll, a "Next Episode" box pops up in the corner and I am in a race against time to click the teeny Cancel button. I think they give me five whole seconds before auto-starting the next episode. There should be a global setting to switch Autoplay Off in your settings.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  mpv will often allow that. This of course is predicated on a site supporting MPV, often meaning the content is independently downloadable, even if not officially. Industry's track record with user-specified anti-dark-pattern preferences (DNT, prefers-reduced-motion, etc.) is not encouraging.

suyash 5y ago

At my previous company the magic word was "consumption" and goal for everyone seem to be drive consumption of our services at any cost. Now you can understand what that would lead to. User preferences and best interest is generally last thing on everyone's mind.

hinkley 5y ago
Consumption just makes me think this person has tuberculosis.

hinkley 5y ago

Engagement is a number you can game. Makes me wonder if they have their 'gamification' and 'game theory' wires crossed.

elihu 5y ago

The thing that frustrates me about the idea of optimizing for engagement, is that the winning strategy seems to be to make the interface worse. If it's hard to navigate and find things, then people spend more time using the product. I assume that web developers have some techniques to determine whether people are spending more time on the site because it's legitimately useful and they're getting a lot of value out of it versus blundering around and not finding what they're looking for, but the whole idea of "engagement" seems like it could be summed up as "we don't think the distinction between those two things is important".

hanspeter 5y ago

> So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement Without arguing against that your marketing team was just following industry trends blindly, I would claim it's hard to imagine a product where increased engagement is not a benefit to the business. Being top-of-mind as a product and a brand is a big advantage, and even with no direct sale, ad revenue or referrals happening from the engagement, you will see increased conversions from word-of-mouth and increased resell/upsell on the product or associated products.