Rules of Engagement: Commenters Only Need Apply

For any content provider -- TV, online, radio -- engagement is the key. TV doesn't just want eyeballs, it wants them to pay attention to the ads. Websites don't just want unique visitors, they want active participants. Radio doesn't just want a set of ears, ... you get the point. Engagement is the most important piece to the puzzle. Measuring engagement, however, is quite difficult.

It is very easy to tell if someone has the TV on or clicked to your blog (thanks, by the way), but it's tough to tell if they do much while they're there. Businessweek.com claims to have the answer. Sort of. BusinessWeek has decided it is no longer going to measure its readership based on unique visitors and click-throughs. The site claims that it will effectively be able to measure engagement by looking at the number of comments compared to the number of blog posts for a given period of time.

I don't know about you, but there are a few blogs I read every day (have you made us a favorite yet?), and I have never posted a response on any of them. That's like judging the success of talk radio (another favorite of mine) based on the number of callers. It just doesn't work that way. Is it a helpful indication that BusinessWeek could look at with other factors to possibly make an educated guess about engagement? Sure. Does it reveal anything more than that? No.