Engagement Defined In One Slide

I have been accused many times of being “semantically driven” to differentiate myself (that means I am too focused on proper definitions and how to use terms well — see my position on hybrid clouds and social CRM from back in the day… oh, and journeys).

I don’t do it for that, naturally.  I do it because we cannot have good conversations without agreeing on what we are talking about.  What would happen if you asked me a question about whether I like how my new car rides and I would say in return something like “the texture has a weird mouth feel”.

Sounds ridiculous?  Same happens when I talk to people about Engagement these days.

I recently had the opportunity to prepare and present a deck on Engagement with my dear friends at Freshworks for the Refresh 2019 conference that finished yesterday.  As part of this deck I created a definition of engagement that I want to share — maybe collect your opinions on it?

This is my poor, simple take based on the work of some of my good friends: more than anyone else the incredible discussions I had with Alan Berkson (Head of Global Community dude at Freshworks  – or a better defined title, but an evangelist at heart who proposed me for this engagement and I hope I did not disappoint him), and the work that Paul Greenberg just published (which we talked, at length, about before he got there) in his new book “The Commonwealth of Self-Interest” (COSI) where he discusses engagement with amazing detail and examples (pick a place where to buy it here, trust me on this).

What do you think?

ps – if you want to see the entire deck, which is awesome, please let me know and will find a way to share it.

disclaimer – Freshworks is,  of course, a client and i was compensated for the presentation and expenses of participating in the conference.  there were some discussions about agenda and content, as there is always with everyone who hires me, but i always retain editorial integrity (i don’t write what i cannot defend, and i don’t defend what i don’t believe in) and the final content was all mine and resulted from the last seven years of extensive research on the topic of engagement — including work done on behavioral science, psychology, and even human resources.  i have a lot more to share on this topic, but we are just getting started and definitely a good time to put out a definition so we can all be talking about cars, not food.