A comment from another blogger reminded me of a topic I was noodling around earlier, but hadn’t gotten right.

It’s about bandwidth. Not the Internet kind, but the engagement kind.

The idea is simply this: your typical customer/prospect has limited bandwidth available for your message. Yet the available bandwidth of the engaged customer is enormous.

To reach the unengaged consumer, your ad has to deliver in a microsecond. Your Web site must invite further examination in only a couple seconds. Your story in the newspaper might get lucky and last a few minutes. Disengaged attention spans are fragmented and minuscule.

Contrast that with the bandwidth of an engaged customer.

They’re waiting to hear from you. They’re checking your blog to see what’s new. And they’ve got time for more than a few nanoseconds of your message.

When you’re speaking to a disengaged audience, the available customer attention bandwidth is small. But the available *bandwidth* of an engaged mind is huge.

That’s why viewing a business blog as just another channel for corporatespeak and PR is wasteful. Use it as a pipeline for standard interrupt content, and you’re wasting all but a fraction of the available customer bandwidth.

Of course, ads, PR and static Web sites serve critical purposes (helping create engaged customers numbering among them). But any question as to the value of engagement demands recognition of the bandwidth differences.

The Metrics Question

Recently, engagement bloggers have been kicking around the idea of engagement metrics - the means by which we measure the value of engagement marketing to an organization.

I stumbled over the whole discussion. Measuring the value of engagement using “standard” web metrics seemed weak. Part of the reason is bandwidth.

No true measure of engagement value could avoid the customer bandwidth issue and remain meaningful.

Contrast the ability to move multiple messages through a pipeline to a willing customer (who hears them in their entirety) with fighting for a second’s attention from a divided mind, and it’s clear that “visits” and “page views” become meaningless.

An “engaged page view” might equal several “disengaged” page views. It’s even possible the “order of magnitude” rule applies; it costs 10x more to “create” a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.

Perhaps it also takes 10x “disengaged impressions” to rival the value of a single “engaged” impression. (I have no evidence to back a 10x metric. It’s just a number that works in other situations.)

An apt comparison might be buying gasoline by time; $10 a minute might be fair for a slow pump, but a fast pump could move 10x the fuel, creating a very different value for the customer.

Of course, this discussion avoids the potential costs of creating an engaged customer, but life is short and my eyes are tired.

I’d love to hear what others think.

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