Big Picture (Summer 2009)

By Bruce Bolger

Say goodbye to Motivation Strategies; please welcome Engagement Strategies Media as your new multi-media portal to the emerging world of Enterprise Engagement – a field dedicated to making the strategic link between financial results and customer, employee and channel partner engagement.

Enterprise Engagement is critical in today’s economy because companies with engaged customers and employees outperform those with low-engagement. Why? Because, in an era when almost anyone can have an e-commerce site or provide a product or service at a lower price, the customer experience often provides the critical edge. It helps explain why companies such as Southwest Airlines, Nucor Steel, Costco and McDonald’s generally outperform their competitors – they’ve managed to engage their customers and employees in a sustainable way that fosters greater loyalty and word-of-mouth.

Enterprise Engagement Media is the information arm of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance, a coalition of leading corporations, associations and marketing firms dedicated to underwriting research and outreach related to this emerging field. It includes this quarterly print publication, Engagement Strategies Magazine (EngagementStrategiesOnline.com); e-mail and RSS newsletters; a portal to information from all qualified resources at EnterpriseEngagement.org; Enterprise Engagement Webinars; the Enterprise Engagement Expo & Conference in New York City in April 2010; and other products and services to be announced next year. The Enterprise Engagement Alliance will help fund research, such as its first study on The Economics of Engagement, available at www.incentivecentral.org/pdf/Final_Economics_of_Engagement.pdf.

While Engagement Strategies Media has the single purpose of helping executives and managers achieve financial and other business objectives by understanding and maximizing the link between engagement across the entire organization – including all customers, distribution partners and employees – it’s a topic that requires expertise in many key areas, including:

Leadership – having CEOs and managers who understand engagement and how to foster it;
Communication – knowing how to integrate all communications, including advertising, public relations, Web content, social networking, meetings, events, promotional products, custom publishing, and more, to convey and substantiate your brand message, educate customers, and equip your employees.
Training – providing the management training needed to make sure that engagement is part of the culture;
Incentive Programs – focusing employees on specific goals and equipping them to achieve them;
Customer Loyalty – finding better ways to build bonds with customers and prospects;
Rewards and Recognition – fostering the sense of support and appreciate known to drive long-term performance.
Technology – benefiting from customer relationship management, the Web, Webinars, online learning, etc. to better engage external or internal audiences.

That’s a lot of ground to cover, which is why you’ll find that Engagement Strategies Media is unlike most traditional trade media in that it seeks to inform readers of all of the information resources in this emerging world of Enterprise Engagement – including those of associations, magazines and websites specializing in various areas of Engagement, even though they may cover and compete for the same audience we do. Our mission, as we see it, is to provide you with useful, actionable information, not to “protect our turf,” at the expense of our readers and subscribers. It’s a big tent, and we believe we can accomplish more by being inclusive rather than exclusive.

Who should worry about Enterprise Engagement? Any CEO, senior executive, or manager who needs the help of customers, channel partners, salespeople, or employees to achieve a business goal. Enterprise Engagement Media is for any executive or manager seeking research, how-to and reference information, case studies and leadership profiles they can learn from for the benefit of their organizations, job performance and career development.

We believe that the world of Enterprise Engagement is too big for any one media company to cover by itself. Therefore, when you subscribe to the print edition – it’s free if you’re a qualified business executive – or to our electronic editions, you’ll be notified when there’s information, trends, news, or research related to your topics of interest from wherever we can find it, in the U.S. or abroad.

In the meantime, you can find a definition and history of Enterprise Engagement on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Engagement, receive updates on new information as we create it or find it on LinkedIn at the EEA professionals group at www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1926267, or via Twitter at @EEA_Org

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