AUTHOR: Sarah Cove TITLE: "Engaging Reach" DATE: 1/28/2007 02:44:00 PM ----- BODY:

I read a post the other day that appeared on my Emergic RSS Feed about Mark Kingdon's claim that, in the digital world, "reaching" a consumer is only step one of the game, and not the end goal. And that measuring "engaging reach" was what should now be considered important. Questions like: "What is `engaging reach?'" and "What possibilities is the distinction bringing forth?" arose in me over time and as I had conversations with people about this. And so I started to do some research on it. I found a post from a "Marketing for IT" blog describing "engaging reach" as the next" performance metric" for advertisers to rank consumers on the Internet: "It is simply not enough to demonstrate that someone has seen your ad or responded to your content. IT advertisers want to know how long they perused your content, what they did with it once they downloaded it, who they passed it along to..." "Engaging reach" seems to be a distinction coming from people who are marketing/advertising on the Internet. And it distinguishes a set of metrics to measure how many times people "click-through" on a site, how long people stay on a site, etc. It is a way of understanding the amount of attention and time people give to a site and to certain content. I don't know what to think of this distinction. I can see that it could be a useful way for advertisers to rank certain sites, perhaps to get a better knowledge of what specific groups of customers are doing on the web, etc. But I'm too ignorant of the marketing field at this point to know what breakdowns it is trying to take care of and if this distinction is going to provide a great new deal of insight and direction for the way marketing relates to its customers or if this is just an extension of "business-as-usual." And, in this moment, I'm a little disappointed. When I first read the post and heard the distinction, I translated it into the discourse that is arising surrounding Web 2.0, social networks, and the transformative potential of distributed media, and more in particular, into the framing of Yochai Benkler's book, Wealth of Networks." (Now, I have to say that I am a beginner in this field, actually not even a beginner. I have dipped my foot into the lake and enjoyed the temperature and feel of the water. And now I am just beginning to learn to wade in the pool, in the hopes of one day being able to swim -- with which stroke, I don't yet know.) I had the following conversation: "It seems that this article might be declaring "reaching" an audience as waste. Previously, when we had centralized networks that distributed media and advertising, and people only had a choice of a several hundred different outlets to choose from, all we needed to do was saturate those channels, we would "reach" the consumer, and people would "choose" to buy our products. "Reaching" was the main concern of ours. Now that our customers have millions of choices about where to get their media, and many people on the Internet are moving in the space oriented to specific concerns, we can't just be tranquilized with getting information out there. We need to build products, conversations, and services that deal with our customers in fundamentally different ways. And questions that open up this "engaging reach" could be: Who are these people as customers? In this new digital networked space, it seems that we are interacting with individuals who are moving about the space with a set of concerns. What are those concerns? What are concerns? How can we better understand them, and understand ourselves as a means of taking care of our customers' concerns." And, as I write, something new comes to me. Even though I was disappointed that my above conversation was not the conversation happening between those discussing "engaging reach", I noticed something even more interesting. That in reading about "engaging reach," I had been blindly and arrogantly translating the words of this discourse to fit into the world I am creating. And my criminal act was that I didn't know I was doing this. This indiscriminate behavior is something I have seen happening in many conversations that people, including myself, have. It is an isolating behavior, tranquilizing people to stay within the worlds and discourses that they/I are/am and to become even more comfortable in their bubble. So this blog, as an assignment to grow, led me somewhere very different from where I had anticipated it going. Instead of gaining some "truth" about a distinction, I glimpsed a fundamental part of who I am in this moment.

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