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These webinars cover an increasing number of topics related to Enterprise Engagement; many more will be added this year. Many thanks to our sponsors.

The interview details a cutting-edge approach to linking customer and employee engagement that enables Enterasys to achieve best-in-class customer satisfaction and employee retention, and, in turn, business success. This interview both demonstrates the potential of enterprise engagement, and the role recognition companies can play. You can access the interview at http://bit.ly/wGTum0 .

By the way, Rideau has led the way in the world of engagement. To build more trusted relationships, it has created multiple learning resources, such as its Recognition Radio program and Recognition Institute to help organizations maximize results.

I’ve been wondering when the recognition business would expand into consumer loyalty, since many of the loyalty companies focus more on rewards and technology than serious relationship-building. I happened to notice recently that The Miller Co., a well-known Texas-based recognition firm, changed its tag line to “Engaging People, Building Brands.”

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As you can see by visiting http://www.enterpriseengagement.org, he all but called out for Enterprise Engagement.

The media is part of the problem.

Is it not now news that dozens of top companies, including McDonalds, Whole Foods, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Hewlett Packard, Nicor Energy , New York Stock Exchange and AstraZeneca, have undertaken strategic engagement efforts?

Is that not a trend?

And yet, where have you read about this outside of the human resources and marketing trade media?

Just when Americans, indeed the world, are calling out for a new humane form of management, the business media are overlooking a clear trend: dozens of major companies have launched engagement strategies and have sent hundreds of top management to Marcus Evans events and other conferences on engagement over the past two years to find out how it’s done.

The companies that have embraced this strategy so far have not seen any particular need to tout it either, as it provides them with a clear competitive advantage.

A television producer at CBS television news to whom I spoke about this trend told me in so many words…“The problem with this story is that there aren’t any visuals.”

We wrote Thomas Friedman a letter to tell him about the emerging field of Enterprise Engagement…

As of yet, we haven’t heard back from him.

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All about price?

I heard WCBS Newsradio and Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Connolly say the other day that price has become everything…

Not so. Look at the performance of Whole Foods over the last year, whose stock has provided a handsome return for investors. People will pay more for a pleasant, quality experience. Shopping for Christmas dinner, I needed help finding two items over the course of a recent visit. Two separate employees made a point of guiding me right to them so that I could be on my way. Millions shop there, even though many call it ‘Whole Paychecks.’

Where the rubber meets the road.

I walk into a Verizon dealer near my home to get a new screen cover for my Droid 2 smartphone. The young man guides me to the product, then, without my asking, offers to apply it to my screen, which can be a delicate process. As he does so, he nonchalantly points out that this is an old smart phone, that there are new versions that are much faster, etc. When I point out that I do not think I’m good for an upgrade, he calmly says that he’ll check it out after he applies the plastic cover. He carefully cleans my screen and applies the cover so that suddenly my screen is like new. Within a few more moments he has determined that I am indeed good for an upgrade and points out the advantages of going to the new 4G models. I like my phone, but I’m always interested in the latest versions. You can imagine the rest. I didn’t buy right then and there, but I’ll be back after the holidays. This is how engagement translates into sales and profits.

What investors want.

Ray Hoffman of the Wall Street Journal and CBS Newsradio recently noted that the stocks that did the best this year were companies like McDonalds, Abbott Labs, Pfizer and others that returned a good old fashioned dividend. He wryly noted that people who invest like their parents did were outperforming many hedge funds. When investors begin to think that way again, there will be a further impetus for Enterprise Engagement.

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Mass marketers beware: the reliance on false and misleading advertising, deliberately confusing pricing strategies, and neglectful customer service is increasingly threatened by the ability of customers to rapidly rebel en masse.

The engagement of customers highly depends upon the engagement of employees.

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As you know, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance has a clear, ambitious mission: to help support a new formal business practice required of every business manager—the ability to engage. This capability is required by the new world of business in which consumers and employees have increasing power. If we don’t engage them, we lose out to those who can.

Our accomplishments include:

• Launch of a Formal Framework for Enterprise Engagement. Like many other fields, Enterprise Engagement involves the integration of a number of key business areas, including leadership, surveys/assessments, communications, training, collaboration, rewards and recognition, and measurement. Engagement is a skill and knowledge base required of all management.There are now emerging full-service engagement agencies that help companies with engagement strategies in the same way as do advertising agencies for marketers. The EEA is helping organizations of all kinds by creating a formal framework for implementation.
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• Completed the launch of its formal Enterprise Engagement Curriculum in conjunction with Marcus Evans, one of the world’s leading providers of high level business education. Management from over a dozen companies attended the first paid Marcus Evans event in Boston, and up to 10 programs are planned for 2012. New curriculum modules were created in 2011on Measurement and Rewards and Recognition, and many more will be added in 2012.We are pleased that we are now being asked by both suppliers and organizations to provide training and facilitation on enterprise engagement practices for their organizations.
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• Launched an ongoing online curriculum delivered via free webinars that include corporate case studies of enterprise engagement strategies. There will be a dozen held in 2012. We will be announcing the full 2012 webinar schedule in the next two weeks.
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• Created the Enterprise Engagement Benchmark Indicator that organizations can use quickly benchmark their Enterprise Engagement strategies and tactics against best practices and those of other organizations. It’s anonymous, free, and provides results as soon as you fill out the survey and hit submit. You can try it at: http://www.eewidget.com/eebenchmark.
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• Relaunched the http://www.EnterpriseEngagement.org portal to make it easier to find useful information and resources in this broad field.
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• Created concrete business opportunities for suppliers who have engagement solutions, services, and products.
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We can proudly state that no other organization provides a broader set of concrete information solutions to help companies that are seeking to profit from engagement; a more direct way for organizations to find suppliers who can assist them, or a more efficient way for suppliers to reach potential customers in this field.

Whatever your role or interest in this growing field, we look forward to helping your organization profit from it in any way we can.

All the best for a great 2012.

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The design should make it much easier to find information from our vast library of articles, resources, and links, and to access key resources to help you with your efforts engaging your critical business audiences. Two main changes we’d like to point out is that we’ve included a new highlight box in the upper right corner of the main page linking to our most requested and popular content:

1. Overview of Enterprise Engagement—a quick overview of the field
2. The Economics of Enterprise Engagement—a compendium of research
3. The free Enterprise Engagement Benchmark Indicator—a quick and easy way to benchmark an organization’s Enterprise Engagement tactics.

And.. we’ve added the ability to comment and provide feedback in the articles section so that you can engage with us and other members of the EEA.

We hope you find the new additions and changes helpful. As always we welcome your input and content in the form of case studies, insights, and new product announcements related to any aspect of engagement in business.

A big thanks to our sponsors, which include many of the leaders in the emerging world of enterprise engagement.

We hope you will take advantage of their services as well as those other companies in our supplier directory that can help make engagement happen in your organization or for clients.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome. Have a great holiday.

You can test it at http://www.eewidget.com/eebenchmark

Simply fill out the questionnaire, click on submit, and the results come up instantly. Complete confidentially is assured, because there’s no need to identify yourself or your client. Please feel free to share any feedback with me.

The questions are based on extensive research on Enterprise Engagement practices and on input from Allan Schweyer, EEA Chairman and an expert on employee engagement; Rodger Stotz, the Incentive Research Foundation’s Chief Research Officer and an expert on channel partner engagement, and Tom Hoffman, Executive Business Editor for Peppers & Rodgers’ 1to1 Media division.

This tool was made possible by sponsorship support from Canon Special Markets, JWT Inside, and Marcus Evans.

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You might have seen the moving ad from manufacturing giant GE demonstrating the emotional connection between its employees and customers.  (Embeded video at right – Subscribers may need to click through to see video.)

The spot shows an employee at work building devices for cancer treatment wondering about the people who benefit from his work, and then turns to an interview with a beneficiary of these devices wondering about the people who build the machines. The ad culminates in a tear-emitting meeting organized by the company bringing together customers and employees to share their different perspectives. One of the workers spoke of the meaning this experience brought to his work. One of the customers spoke of the pleasure she derived from meeting the people who make the machines.

This ad potentially portends a new wave of marketing in which organizations seek to promote their human sides and contributions to society to address the growing hostility toward business.

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One of the companies involved with the Enterprise Engagement Alliance is a long-standing integrated marketing agency that moved away from focusing solely on meetings and incentives several years ago to provide a more broad-based, solutions-oriented performance improvement services. As a result, it was a natural for the company to embrace “enterprise engagement,” and the firm, which I cannot name here, was one of our first founding sponsors and remains actively involved.

The president told me an interesting story of interest to anyone in marketing and especially in the traditional “full-service” incentive business. I have had to disguise both the name of his company, the entities involved, and even the specific type of program,  because all of the parties, and this program, are well-known in the industry. That said, I personally witnessed much of what he shared with me, so this is essentially first-hand information.

His company received an RFP from a leading consumer products manufacture for its traditional incentive and relationship-building strategy for a large audience of independent salespeople.

Ordinarily, the president of the company I cannot name, told me they would not respond to blind RFPs, but this time decided to use it as a test of their new emphasis on Enterprise Engagement. From the start, they accessed EEA research and other resources to help create their proposal, demonstrating how the organization would apply a zero-based analysis to the potential client’s performance opportunities and challenges, and would bring to bare whatever type of solution, from mission and strategy development, training, and communications, to rewards and recognition, and measurement to help the organization achieve its goals.  Their proposal emphasized the organization’s focus on engagement.

Not only did this company make the first cut, but after months more of work, including multiple presentations and an office visit, it won the business, which, to my understanding, is a multi-million dollar engagement. Perhaps the most gratifying part of the story to me:  the client now uses “engagement” to describe the company’s new program, tossing out the old terminology.

This company is overjoyed not only because they won such a prestigious piece of business from such a prestigious competitor, but for another reason; it shows that organizations can’t fake Enterprise Engagement. To deliver these services, organizations have to have a clear grasp of all of the key elements that go into engagement, not only incentives, rewards, and meetings. You can’t just add a few lines to your web site claiming to be in engagement.

Since ad agencies have little clue about sales, channel, employee or even customer engagement (beyond advertising), there is a significant opportunity for traditional incentive companies that should have already mastered a lot of the tools of engagement. In fact, we see more and more incentive companies using “engagement” on their web sites, but are surprised by how few are demonstrating any clear effort to train their sales, marketing, and management on what it really takes to provide engagement services.  We continue to still hear the same platitudes that amount to implying that “incentives” are the solution to everything.

In one short year, companies like our friend’s have proven that engagement and its opportunities are for real, and are changing the competitive landscape. As usual, it will probably take years before traditional players fully awaken to the opportunity. The only question is how many will step up to profit from the “early to market” advantage?

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