Today marks my last day at Forrester Research.

As many of my colleagues tell me, I have a very eclectic background. Music, politics, technology, design, business... it was all by design, and it will continue to grow and expand.

In September, my new phase will begin when I join Jeffrey Dachis, former co-founder of Razorfish, to help him build a new company focused on developing an enterprise social software platform. I'll also be joining my former Forrester colleague, Peter Kim. We'll be working closely to help Jeff build this company.

As for Forrester, it's as strong as ever. I've worked with brilliant people before, but Forrester is certainly the largest collection of intellectual firepower I've ever witnessed. I walk away a much smarter person than I came in, and for that I am grateful. There are exciting times ahead with the Jupiter acquisition. It's a group of very talented people that are a great addition for the Forrester team.

I've learned so much from my time there. I'm a much better writer, communicator, and thinker. I was able to push big ideas into the market place. My reports about Engagement was the theme of our 2008 Marketing Forum, I was its opening keynote speaker, and I eventually won me our Top Keynote award. I've gained a unique perspective on the marketplace, perched from a location very few get to experience. And that insight makes me stronger, and well equipped for this new venture.

Now I know it's the time to act and put my ideas into practice--the opportunity is too great.

This new job is ambiguous. I don't have a job title. The company doesn't have a name. At the moment, there are only three of us. We don't know what this will become, we only have a general direction. My office will be at my house... in Austin... and in cyberspace on IM, Twitter, Facebook... To many, this recipe might spell fear. To me, it's comfortable. I thrive in the unknown--no rules, no baggage, no momentum to pull us into mediocrity. We get to build this from scratch in a thoughtful and disciplined manner. It's my opportunity to bring my engagement ideas to life and the perfect time to leverage my background to apply a design thinking approach to the way we, and our clients, do business. And I'm excited to get to work, executing on Jeff's vision, learning from his experience and a brilliant entrepreneur--a path I see myself taking in the not too distant future.

Our goal is to help companies navigate and participate in this changing world, charged with social technologies and driven by people and employees who are in control. We're looking for companies that need help navigating these waters, we're looking for partners and developers to help us build this engine, and we're looking for smart people to help us realize this vision. If you're interested, contact Jeff at jdachis at austinventures dot com.

More to come...

UPDATE: Sorry I didn't clarify, I'm going to remain in Boston.

Finally, there's a video excerpt of my keynote speech for Forrester's Marketing Forum in Los Angeles (April 8-9, 2008). The theme of the entire conference was based on my report, Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement. I was the opening keynote on the first day of the conference. The title of my speech was Engagement: A New Approach To Understanding Your Customers.

It was pretty exciting once I got on stage, but it certainly was stressful in the preparation and rehearsal phase. It's admittedly difficult to find time with all of the other analyst responsibilities on my plate. Regardless, the keynote was a hit.

I opened with a fascinating story about Jen, an IKEA fan from Ohio. I told her story about attempting to encourage IKEA to open a store near her in Cincinnati. She did this using her fan blog, OHIKEA.com.

Then I debunked the marketing funnel (one of my favorite things to do), introduced my Engagement framework, and aligned it with the buying process. Then I told a story of Laura, who is an engaged user of Glaxo Smith Klein Consumer Healthcare's alli weight loss product. My good friends at Communispace were kind enough to connect me with Laura and share the sucesses of their online community for GSK.

I closed by recommending how to measure engagement. I'll follow up with another post including the details of my speech, but overall the experience was fantastic, I received lots of positive feedback, and it was certainly fun. Kerry was the keynote on day two, discussing Designing For Engagement — and she rocked it as well.

Expanding on my previous research on engagement (Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement, 06 August 2007 - Forrester Research), I'm kicking off a new research plan to publish an updated report that get's into more of the nitty gritty. The first report developed the working framework for understanding and measuring engagement (involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence). Unfortunately, many people think engagement is time spent on a site. That's just boring, narrow, and just plain lame. There's more to it than that. Surprise, people not only exist in the digital world, but in the physical world too.

So, I've enlisted my colleague, Suresh Vittal, to join me in this quest. He'll co-author the report with me and we'll approach the research together, which is a good thing because he's the heavy hitter when it comes to the technology and analytics.

If you have any good company examples of how firms have truly tracked and measured integrated campaigns across several channels (online and offline), please send them my way. We're looking for people to talk to and examples that will illustrate our points.

Measure engagement—the real engagement. It’s funny, marketers dump 92% of their budget into traditional channels that are extremely difficult to measure, the other 8% go to interactive channels where they basically use the same metrics they’ve used for the past five decades. Then they complain that they can’t determine the value of social media. Yawn. My sympathy is wearing thin. 

Get to know your customer’s better.
Measure engagement—the real engagement.
Be a little more fearless with social media.
Reconsider your business model.
Bring on a designer at a senior level.
Show some real corporate responsibility.

I recently published a Forrester report titled Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement (more detail here on the Forrester Marketing blog). One interesting aspect of this research was presenting the idea that the marketing funnel is more complex than we may think. I initially presented to my fellow marketing analysts an idea that suggest the funnel was dead. That didn't go over so well, which demonstrates how sacrosanct the funnel is to marketers. However, they also presented a good point that the current funnel (awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, loyalty) is meant to provide a framework for marketers to understand all buying decisions at a meta level. With that, I proposed, and published, that the funnel is more complex, not necessarily dead. The point here (see graphic below) is that the center of the funnel is a lot more complex now. There are a lot of addition factors impact a person's decision making process.

[Click to view the full size image.]

Another insight here is that we need to think differently about what a 'valued customer' is. Traditionally, we think a person that buys a lot from us (at a profitable price point and not necessarily at discount) is a good customer. We through in other factors like frequency and dollar value of purchase, but overall it's about buying. However, one of the ideas I present about engagement is that someone that contributes content that influences others to buy (even if that creator doesn't actually spend much with you) could be extremely valuable. If someone only buys from you once a month, but every time they buy they write an extensive product review that increases the likelihood that readers of that review will buy — that's a valuable person too.

[Thanks to Critical Massers Scott Weisbrod and David Armano as well as Blake Cahill from Visible Technologies for helping carry on the conversation. I'll come back to this idea here very soon.]