STAY HUMAN - Stopping Engagement Entropy Rot

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

This is the seventh, and last post in our campaign exploring the seven signs you might be about to become a B2B Zombie. We’ll cover the symptoms, the cure, and simple steps to success. And read to the end for a useful reading list (we know from our stats you all love a reading list).

1 - How to avoid Generic Thought Leadership Disease
2 - Escaping from Buzzword Dependency Syndrome 
3 - Overcoming Algorithmic Addiction 
4 - Curing your Corporate Voice Affliction
5 - Moving away from Template Dependence Disorder
6 - Breaking out of Risk Aversion Paralysis 
7 - How to cure Engagement Entropy Rot (that’s this post!)

As we’re talking about engagement this week, thank you to everyone who has replied, shared, or reposted this series over the last few months. It’s really great to get feedback, and in particular to see people sharing the posts with their networks on LinkedIn.

Last week Anjali and I were in SXSW testing a new workshop with four very practical steps for telling better B2B stories. It went really well - lots of engagement and energy in the room, and people have been in touch to say they found it really valuable. Would you like us to come and run the workshop with your teams? If so, get in touch and we’ll set up a call asap!

Finally, we’ve got a couple of ideas for what we think would be really valuable for our next Attention Matters series. We’d love you to help us decide! Vote in the poll below, and if you’ve got another suggestion, please hit reply and let us know!

1 - What are the symptoms?

There is one reason we’re all creating so much B2B content - we want a response. The trouble is, getting a response from your audience is harder than it’s ever been, so a lot of our beautifully crafted content goes out into the world to be met by…. silence. How many of these symptoms of Engagement Entropy Rot sound familiar to you?

• Zero comments on social posts

• Blog posts with high bounce rates

• Newsletters with declining open rates

• Webinars with dropping attendance

• Videos that never get watched

The funny thing is, it’s only been in the last few decades that we have been able to directly hear and measure engagement from our audience. Before the rise of web 2.0 in the early 2000s, it was extremely difficult to hear directly from your audience. The social media boom of the last twenty years turned up the volume, and for a brief period it felt remarkably easy to get conversations going with our peers and customers. But as the social media platforms changed and became more toxic, it feels like we’re going back to the era of one-way broadcasting again.

2 - Take The Test

The problem is that many marketing and brand teams are still working from playbooks and strategies that were developed in that web 2.0 engagement boom. We’re still measuring our success by numbers on public platforms, rather than thinking about the kind of conversations we want. We’re still measuring quantity, not quality. So if we don’t get big numbers, it feels like we’ve failed. Does the test below feel familiar?

3 - Here’s the cure

The first thing to do is to recognise that the engagement bubble of the peak social media years was exactly that - a bubble. The reality is that most engagement doesn’t happen in plain sight, on public social media platforms. We spend more time discussing and sharing content we find interesting in private or group social spaces, like Slack, messaging apps, and even good old email.

Back in 2012, Atlantic journalist Alex Madrigal noticed this, and wrote a hugely influential post about what he called ‘Dark Social’. Even in 2012, still very much the boom years of social media, he estimated that 69% of engagement happened in ‘dark social’ space, compared to 20% on Facebook.

When I worked at Channel 4 back in 2007, commissioning cross platform educational content for 14-19 yr olds, I realised that we needed to think about the very different kinds of social spaces teens used on the internet, and how we’d need to change our expectations for engagement in each of them. I came up with six social spaces - secret spaces, group spaces, publishing spaces, performing spaces, participation spaces and watching spaces - each of which had different expectations and behaviours from users. Even now, nearly 20 years later, I still go back and think about how platforms today map against the different social spaces we need, and how the engagement we get from audiences will be different as well.

This is probably the most important question you need to ask if you’re not getting engagement on your B2B content. Are you asking for engagement in the wrong spaces? A lot of B2B marketers map engagement on to marketing funnels, but the reality of engagement is that it happens in social spaces, where audiences feel comfortable having conversations. Really valuable engagement happens when you create lots of spaces and options for conversation. It doesn’t happen when you think of engagement solely as something that drives potential clients through a funnel.

4 - Our simple steps to success

The one rule to remember is that engaging with your audiences is about CONVERSATION NOT NUMBERS. You need to leave room in your content to encourage and prompt people to start talking to you, like you would if you were having a drink or dinner together. If you want to stop being the pub bore who just drones on, and start having proper conversations, here’s some tips:

• Ask for help with what you don’t know - We’ve talked a bit in this series about the power of admitting you’re not an expert, and this is especially true when you’re looking to increase engagement. Your audience is (hopefully) a much larger group of people than your team, with incredibly diverse experiences. If you have their attention, ask them for help or advice on the subjects you’re discussing.

• Fold the conversation into the format - We are social animals, and we’re far more likely to do something if we see other people doing it. So if you have a great conversation with someone in your audience, mention it in the next episode of your format, and if you have their permission, use their real names. The rest of your audience will see this example of social engagement, and it will prompt some of them to get in touch as well.

• Let your audience talk to each other - this is a more complex move, but the conversations you create don’t always have to be with you. It’s really valuable to be the convenor of interesting conversations, whether this is in online discussions, conferences or dinner parties. My favourite social space online right now is a Slack channel for contributors to a newsletter in the US. I didn’t realise they hosted this when I started contributing to the newsletter, but I’ve made real friends hanging out in that Slack channel.

4 - Go Deeper

Conversations Are The New Unit of Culture - The rise of podcasts, and weird short videos where people look like they’re on a podcast, as been one of the most remarkable trends in media in recent years. This great interview with Kyle Chayka and Tope Folarin suggests that audiences want more conversational formats, as it helps us consider and understand our own opinions and reactions. I love this take, and it aligns with the ‘six spaces’ framework I mentioned above.

Louis Theroux on Interviewing Controversial Subjects - Ok, you might not be having conversations with people from the extremes of society, as the brilliant interviewer Louis Theroux does, but this Q&A with him includes lots of tips about how to have really great conversations: “I always feel like there’s a question before the one that you asked that is the one that you forgot to ask. This is going to sound really banal, but it’s sort of like, “Why do you do this?” Or even, “What is the thing that you do?” It’s quite common to get deep into a conversation.”

If you made it this far, you’re clearly really interested in engagement, so please hit reply and let’s start a conversation! Or feel free to share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings, and we can have a chat over there instead.

So that’s the end of our seven part guide to how to STAY HUMAN in your B2B content. I hope it was useful! We’re going to take a few weeks off to plan the next series - please vote in the poll at the top of this post to let us know what you want us to cover. In the meantime, thank you for STAYING HUMAN!

Matt