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Communication vs. engagement

by Robin Grant in News on 2 February 2010 at 16:41

Andrea Di Maio, a VP at Gartner specialising in e-government, recently penned these thoughts about communication and engagement in a Government 2.0 context. I think he’s spot on, and it’s a pretty universal lesson. I swapped the words ‘citizens’ for ‘people’ and ‘government’ for ‘your organisation’ in his text and here’s what I got:

Using social media to communicate means to expand a multichannel communication strategy to encompass new channels. It used to be the counter, the telephone and the web site: now you have the Twitter hashtag or the Facebook page, but these are just channels. Of course people can engage, retweet your information, post on your Facebook page, and so forth. So it would appear that simply setting some ground rules about what people can and cannot do and how the moderation policy works would go a long way toward moving from simple communication to engagement.

But “real” engagement is something else. It is about figuring out where people are already having conversations that your organisation needs to be aware of. It is about bringing information and dialogue to places where people want that dialogue to happen: their blogs, their Facebook groups, their Twitter streams.

In essence, an effective communication strategy is likely to be almost the exact opposite of an effective engagement strategy. The former chooses and controls channels, while the latter joins somebody else’s channels. The former determines rules of engagement, the latter follows somebody else’s rules. The former assumes that people reach out to your organisation, the latter is based on your organisation reaching out to communities and groups.

eda2day

All this argument about engagement vs. communication sounds a bit contrived. If you're trying to convey the message the one to one relating without an agenda is more genuine and rare, then say so. It is what it is: relating one to one. As the t-shirt advises: more wag. less bark.
charlottebeckett

Just had a meeting discussing this topic! My take was that this is the argument for evaluating what you want to do before you select the tools (if I have another call asking for a page on Facebook...). Comms and engagement are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes we can pull people into our worlds, sometimes we need to go to them - and doing both might be the most fruitful approach. Still, saying that, it made for a good headline on the original blog.
Riaz Kanani

hear hear - a comms strategy is definitely different to an engagement strategy - though you dont just need to go out to the communities and groups - I think it is possible over time (and with effort) to build that engagement in a group or location that you manage.