As Ashley Friedlein’s of E-Consultancy has revealed (New metrics and business models for digital publishing – selling outcomes not inputs), last year, the Newspaper Marketing Agency in the UK found that 56% of newspaper site visits last for under one minute.  That’s not a great deal of engagement with content.  If increasing traffic leads to greater numbers of unengaged readers, then who cares.  It has been long argued that only publisher’s have access to the data that advertisers (and PR firms) should really care about eg readership figures for specific stories, engagement time with specific pieces of coverage, etc

However, as Friedlein points out, advertising and PR clients are now in a quite powerful position – they know not only the input they’ve paid for (ads or press coverage generated), but they know the outcomes that these inputs have created (or not).  They can now easily compare different input mechanisms and see which ones perform better than others.  In the context of PR, those that are focussing on delivering outcome based campaigns are clearly going to fare better than those that deliver inputs.

In short, engagement is the name of the game.

But lack of engagement exists everywhere says Escherman PR.  The New York Times has nearly 2.3 million Twitter followers – and yet the click throughs on links to its stories via Twitter often barely break into double figures.  Even the best ones are in the low 000s.  Massive reach in this case isn’t necessarily translating into engagement with content (at least not on the scale that you might imagine).