I delivered a presentation entitled ‘How to measure the “Engaged Web” to gain competitive business advantage,’ at last week’s Marketing Week Live event.  For those of you who were unable to attend, I thought I’d share this presentation with you via a series of posts on our blog. This is the first installment.

The Engaged Web is a term I coined back in April during a talk at Internet World.  I prefer to use it to describe today’s media landscape.  Why? Because I don’t like the term social media which I consider to already be a bit of an anachronism. I believe that organisations have to stop thinking about social media as something new and separate from their current web activities because everything is now social. It’s just what the web is.

So, what does the engaged web look like?

The engaged web looks much like the microscopic view of cells in the diagram below. Unlike the old world which was structured and block like with clearly defined media channels, the engaged web is organic and fluid.

The organisation sits at the centre of the engaged web, surrounded by a landscape of influencers which is constantly changing and interconnecting.  This fluid world consists of traditional old media (newspapers, magazines, tv etc) and the new giants Facebook, YouTube, Twitter et al.

Each of these channels has the ability to interconnect with each other i.e. a story can break on a blog, hit the news stands and then find itself on the evening TV news.

So what does this mean for businesses?

It means that our world has become both larger and smaller.  Larger, because the sheer volume of people able to influence our brand has increased exponentially. Smaller, because the speed and the reach of the internet removes geographical boundaries and constraints.

The engaged web also has the ability to touch all functions of a business; PR marketing, customer service and sales are the obvious choices but product development and HR can also be influenced.  Development teams have rapid exposure and market insight into the minds and expectations of their audiences.

Similarly, a company’s ability to recruit may be hampered by candidate’s exposure to negative postings about their working environment or practices.

Still think that the engaged web is something you don’t have to worry about?

Consider these three recent facts

1. A recent report from Morgan Stanley says that the time people spend on social media has now surpassed that spent on email
2. Facebook has over 400m users, each spending an average 55mins per day on the network
3. Recent research from Gigur has found that social media sites are driving more traffic to sites like ESPN and CNN than Google

People are empowered by online communities which give them a share of voice.  No business can afford not to know what’s being said about their brand.  It’s no coincidence that in 2009, the number of companies looking for “buzz monitoring” tools rose from 21% to 40%.

The engaged web demands complete transparency and visibility by removing barriers which some companies may have used previously to silence critics or hide mistakes.