Enticing engagement

A: Do you love us? B: click click click <Introduce new feature/offer> A: Do you love us now? B: click click click Internet disengagement A: Do you love us? B: click click click A: Do you love us now? B: <Introduce new feature/offer> A: What about now? B: A: Hello? Where did you go? For me, long gone are the days when the word " engagement " conjured up diamonds, parties, and champagne. These days engagement is all about divin-ing how much love your users or audience have for product(s) and/ or application(s). In the Internet world, the word " engagement " is intimately associated with measurement , metrics, and moneti-zation; it is all about clicks and conversion, visitors, page views and duration. This is the world of media marketing, and of Internet success and failure. what is Engagement? Before I dig into Internet engagement measurement, I want to step back and think about what engagement means to me. When first asked about engagement by a colleague at work, I spouted all I knew about the experience of engagement as I understood it from a psychologist's worldview. Flow. Immersion. Fascination. The swift passing of time as attention is held—tempus fugit. The opposite of restless boredom, where time expands painfully and you feel itchy and twitchy and ready for any external stimulus beyond what you are doing now. From a psychologist's point of view, engagement sits within a framework of arousal states—boredom at one part of the spectrum, engagement at another, and stress somewhere in between. Perhaps the most famous approach to thinking about engagement is the concept of flow, proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Flow is the state of full immersion in what one is doing: a feeling of energized focus, total involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Flow is a positive feeling, reflecting an utterly focused concentration and alignment with the current context and your part in it. In some conceptions, flow is associated with feelings of joy and rapture, an exclusion of all but the central activity. Of course, engagement may not be this rapturous positive feeling ; people can be negatively engaged. This is particularly true when something is standing between them and their desired state or goal; think of the term " military engagement. " Whatever the form of engage-ment—positive or negative—cen-tral to concept is the triggering and capturing of attention, of being beguiled …