The ongoing discussion among marketers about how to measure engagement today is a bit anxious. Most marketers seem overwhelmed with their organizational challenges of measuring and analyzing ROI. The realities of having to interact with their IT departments may be more top of mind than how they can get their hands around new customer behaviors in a world of social media.

That according to this summer's Forrester Research report by Brain Haven and Suresh Vittal, “Measuring Engagement.” This June 10 report contributes to the ongoing conversation about how marketers should measure the behaviors of customers and relationships of customers to their brands.

Haven and Vittal lay out the four I's of engagement: involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence. It's an "easy to remember" formula that defines engagement as the level of the four I's that a customer has with a brand over time.

But before we can better understand the customer's engagement, which align with their buying process, Haven and Vittal note the realities that stand in the way of making and using a better measurement: lack of agreement on the meaningful metrics, trouble accessing data, inadequate analysis skills and trouble connecting the insights gained into meaningful creative content.

But before we give up on this critical work, Haven and Vittal offer a strategy:

Define what an Engaged customer looks like (think personas)
Audit Engagement Measurement Capabilities
Assess Value of Metrics
Prioritize Metrics

I can't offer more specifics without violating my user agreement. Forrester offers this insight for a pretty nice fee.

• I've got three opinions about this:

• It's an enlightened organization that will be able to work through the operational challenges and get to work on the 4 I's.

• Technology will surely emerge to help this process

Staying engaged in this discussion is necessary for all of us in the custom media business.

My 8-year-old daughter is studying the Oregon territory and she refreshed my memory (thanks, Wikipedia) that the U.S. and Great Britain were involved in a land grab during the 1840s. The U.S. ultimately prevailed and a treaty was signed establishing the 49th parallel, the line that runs between the states of Washington and Minnesota on the U.S. side, and British Columbia north of the boundary.

Determining the 49th parallel in the media world is happening right now. The territory in question is the very fertile territory known as engagement. We are witnessing a land grab to define and determine how we will measure and monetize audience engagement with Web media. And there are all sorts of parties putting forward ideas of how to redraw the lines on Web analytics so this idea of engagement is more relevant to current Web media experience.

Like most people in this business, I have become obsessed with this discussion surrounding the idea of engaged audiences, particularly as this discussion centers on Web analytics. (I'm not sure I speak from personal "blogging" experience about engaged audiences when my last post to this page was in January. Mitt Romney looked like our next president when I last blogged in this space). Regardless, I've been paying attention to the people who have been trying to define this idea of engagement.

Forrester, who has been all over engagement for more than a year, is the latest with a set of metrics. Forrester Research's last month at their annual Research Marketing Forum in L.A., which are based on the concepts developed by analyst Brian Haven in an August 2007 Forrester Research report on the same topic, lay out the ideas of Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence. Haven's full report on these metrics, "Measure of Engagement," which is co-authored by Suresh Vittal, will be published this month.

Will Haven's metrics stand the test of time. I think Haven's metrics ( I look forward to the full report) are an advancement in our quest to understand what sometimes seems like the unknowable: what does she think, what is she going to do?

We have ways of of trying to evaluate something like engagement in the print world. As Josh Chasin, chief research officer at comScore, admitted in a column he wrote about engagement, he doesn't really know what engagement means. I can detect enough sarcasm to hear what he's really saying: he believes we don't know what engagement means.

Chasin knows that print and, now, online media, are evaluated based on reach and frequency, which might sound like engagement, but it's not. He's right. We ask how many issues out of 4 do you read?, and how much time do you spend with our magazine? Do you take specific actions as a result of reading my magazine? How many people other than you read this issue?

While I always thought those standard measurements were a little too crude to evaluate the experience a reader has with a magazine, and they never claimed to be engagement, they are pretty darn close to Haven's 4 "Is."

Much closer, in fact, than the idea of trying to use the same reach and frequency measures online, in a medium where the media itself isn't a reach and frequency medium anymore.

But Haven's metrics fall short of being useful for all purposes. While the end goal for most participants in this conversation may be an easier way for advertising agencies to come up with sound ways to direct their client's spend of dollars, that's not the defined goal for all observers of this discussion.

At Hammock, we've noticed how the metrics used to evaluate advertising-centric measurements aren't intrinsically useful discussions for some clients. If selling Web advertising online is even one of the top five things under discussion with an association client when we talk about the Web site, it's rare. The purpose of the site is to create a greater sense of value of membership to the visitor. The purpose of the site may be to spur a call to action. The purpose of the site might be a serve as launchpad for a set of helpful links. It might be a place where members can find helpful tools and advice, it might be a place to renew, or register for a products for which members qualify for a discount. It might even be a place to, yes, engage members, because all associations need ways to ensure that there is some way they can continue to drive home what is valuable in their proposition.

I agree with Chasin about the value of measuring "against a clearly defined set of goals." Chasin points us to Eric Peterson, author of Web Analytics Demystified. Peterson has a series of quantitative and qualitative ways to analyze engagement. It comes down to an idea that what you measure is tied to an idea of what you want the experience of the visitor to be.

Setting goals that can be measured makes sense to me. If generating advertising is the goal, then I await the best sets of metrics for that purpose. If it's not the goal, I think it's on us to develop better ways to measure what we know is engagement.

I got a chuckle this morning when I read my latest Barron's at breakfast (Thanks, Dow Jones, for the unsolicited comp issue that has been showing up in my driveway every Monday for the past two years and Mr. Rupert Murdoch, sir, I hope I'm not dragging down your reader demographic.)

On the cover of the January 28 issue is the headline: "Whack That Bear! The trouble may not be over, but we found 10 stocks that look irresistibly cheap." Just ten pages later is an advertisement for State Street Global Advisors that reads: The naked eye sees ten good investments. The trained eye sees one."

State Street and their trained eye: 1
Barron's and their naked eye: 0

It had me thinking about how bewildering ten choices can be. It also had me thinking about how much of a value it is to help guide clients to the right choice, or, set of choices. If you are making decisions about media for your organization, are you buying the "hot stocks" of the day, or do you have a portfolio" of your marketing media that was planned and managed?

We help clients develop a portfolio of media tools, and assist in the front end planning followed up with back-end implementation.

On to the "hot stocks" of the day: social media. There are a bewildering number of social media products being spawned, all with goals of connecting people for different reasons. Starting a blog, like buying a hot stock, might work out for your organization or it might not. As I stated when I started writing this blog, I'm interested in social media that can be employed in the service of organizations, associations and media companies for strategic and financial gain.

One area of research I look to (2007 E-Publishing Trends & Metrics from the Angerosa Foundation) shows how member associations, for example, experience great anxiety about "keeping up with new e-publishing technology and figuring out how to implement the new technologies effectively for their membership." Not surprising, perhaps, but with associations the stakes are high.

As associations struggle to attract and maintain members without raising dues, they look to do two things simultaneously. Trim costs and create more value for members at the same price. The temptation to migrate to electronic publishing and social media is great as a short-term cost-cutting move. Especially when there are a lot of shiny new communications opportunities that didn't exist a few years ago that seem poised to solve a lot of problems.

Without a plan that is matched to the goals of the organization, it's like investing in the latest hot stock. Some of those investments might run counter to one another. Getting out of print (a risky strategy that many associations consider all the time) may lower costs, but destroy the value that's been created for members.

Wise organizations plan well, and utilize a portfolio of media, integrated by each asset's own particular purpose and strength, within the context of a plan. Social media provides great opportunity. Just don't use a naked eye to evaluate it.

I don't know whether I'd more accurately call myself a converted skeptic or a skeptical convert, but here I am making a blog post. My first one, actually.

I've spent most of the past seven to eight years mocking the value of blogs as some sort of low-cost vanity press. And other social media tools, like Facebook or MySpace, seemed great for connecting people who wanted to date (not an option as I enter my 13th year of matrimony) or posting videos or photos (YouTube, Flickr) of anything that you'd want to see. Great entertainment, admittedly. The most useful social media site to me (Wikipedia) is perfect for what it is, but what can you learn from it that's useful to any other business or organization?

Basically, the questions that I've been seeking answers to are: how, or why, would any business or organization, or media brand, use social media? What role does social media have in the marketing mix? Can value be created from what has seemed to be a set of tools designed for increasingly clever ways to pass the time?

I'm going to use this space for people (clients, prospective clients and other peers) who want and need to know why and how to use social media tools for some sort of valuable purpose. And, in this case, the valuable purpose will be defined in a rather limited, and admittedly sort of a buzz-kill, way. Can you make money? Can you engage existing customers, can you create new customers, can you support your brand?

We've seen what the tools can do for our own firm. We've seen what can be done for a client. There are examples of other organizations being successful with social media that are real. I think we can demystify this area of media so as to find out what has real value for you. If I fail at that, I promise not to use this space for musings about politics, movies, pop culture or anything else.

I think you have plenty of other places to go for that.

John Lavey works with the team of talented professionals at Hammock Inc. to ensure the highest quality experience for all stakeholders in our work: clients, readers, employees, advertisers and other business partners.

John grew up on the Pampas of Argentina herding chinchillas on his parent’s ranch (This portion of his CV has never actually been verified, leading some to believe he grew up in Northern Virginia), building John’s lifelong aptitude for hard work and his discerning eye for beautiful fur coats.

At age 17, John left home to pursue an education in America at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. After college, an internship as a magazine writer led him to pursue “paid” (barely) journalism in Northern Virginia as a staff writer and editor of a weekly and daily newspaper. After meeting the woman who would become his wife, he married, moved to Nashville and became a writer for the Nashville Business Journal, covering the health care and the Metro government beats.

John joined Hammock in 1996 as an editor. He went to business school at night, earning an M.B.A. from the internationally reputed Massey School of Business at Belmont University (yes, the same school that was a No. 16 seed in last year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament). John has served in a number of client service and editorial roles at Hammock, and added business development and internal operational responsibilities to his job.

In his non-Hammock life, John devotes time to his household of females—wife, Hannah, lovely daughters, Frances and Mary Sparks—and the other male in the house, their dog, Winston. He serves his church and his community, including his involvement on the board of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Middle Tennessee. He enjoys reading, cooking and being outside for a multitude of manly activities, including running, biking, attending Titans games and hunting birds—especially stalking the most noble of all quarries, the American Wild Turkey.