Outputs vs. Outputs

A former colleague, Miguel Gonzalez, made this statement about mobile marketing at NATPE 2010 last week in Las Vegas:

“Mobile is the enabling device constantly in the possession of every consumer,” he said. “Instead of counting clicks, look at engagement metrics to measure how you’re doing in the marketplace.” (See the full article here on MobilizedTV.com.)

There are Outputs -- and then there are Outputs. It's not the total impressions that matter, it's how engaged someone was with your content. In Ye Olde Marketing we cared mostly about gross impressions; in modern marketing we care about engagement as well as impressions.

You clicked your way to this blog entry, but what I really care about as a publisher is that you read this far into the text. Do I look at hits per day? Sure. The numbers that matter, however, are new followers who took the time to sign up, time spent on the site, pages viewed and comments written. (A lot of this resulted from my Christmas holiday experiment.)

Miguel's statement was about mobile marketing, but I would argue it applies to all modern marketing. Measurement tools permit us to understand engagement much better than we did before.

Check out Miguel's new blog, Depth on Demand, now appearing on Ad Majorem's blogroll.