Engage This!

I'm afraid that I have to take exception to yet another Web buzzword. This time it's "engagement". It's hot right now. Just ask Eric Peterson, who's making a little cottage industry out of his own "Engagement Index". Please. Make it stop. "Engagement" is no better defined than "intelligence", "happiness", or "it sucks".

I'm really a numbers kinda guy, with the heart of a researcher. That means I resist sloppy thinking. And "engagement" is just that, sloppy thoughts. Naming something and believing that you've driven to the heart of it. Peterson's various components may have merit, but he's going about this all the wrong way. Ideally, you study a big group of things and then derive patterns using standard statistical techniques. You don't just wish them into being, no matter how sure you are that they exist. Then you validate your model against a known situation and see if it holds up. If it wavers, fragments, or veers wide of the mark, then your model is faulty.

So far as I can tell, Peterson has never subjected his model to rigorous validation. His various engagement components in the index aren't weighted, so as one rises another could fall, leaving you with the same EI, but with a different situation entirely. I think anybody who relies on a single-measure EI to make expensive business decisions is playing with a loaded gun with the barrel plugged.

That's not to say that "engagement" could never be defined. It can. But it can be defined only as a series of KPIs that shouldn't be arbitrarily added together. A simple radar chart could show them all. So could time series charts. And it should be defined anew for each site. The quest for a standardized index will go on, but in the end I think it's futile. Adopt a Deming approach and keep working on your own special site. I don't think there are any shortcuts.