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.