Social media and customer engagement

Hi, I'm Julie Atherton. I'm the founder of the social media advisory and marketing consultancy, Small Wonder. I also write books on social media and social media strategy. Today I'm going to be talking about Social Media and Customer Engagement.

We're going to cover the role of customer engagement, the McKinsey customer decision journey model, and then I'm going to talk about how social media is utilised through that customer decision journey.

Let's start with the definition of customer engagement. There are lots of different definitions that we can refer to. I'm using here, my own definition which is from my book on social media strategy. I think here, it's important to think about the depth of a customer-to-brand relationship. That engagement thinks about how that relationship is built and, importantly, the level of trust that the relationship engenders. Which comes through the frequency, the length, and the type of interaction between the customer and the brand. That means that at its best, customer engagement is instigated and maintained by both the brand and the customer. That happens via lots of different activities: marketing, social media, and experiential channel activities in particular. What's most important about this definition of customer engagement is that it talks about the engagement being instigated and maintained by both the brand and the customer. That's particularly important in social media channels, which are these dialogue channels where conversations can be started by either the customer or the brand, and then encouraged and stimulated by both of those parties as well.