So I got home from Holiday traveling to find that I’ve been tagged in the irrepressible blog-tag game by long-time friend and more recently colleague, Eric T. Peterson.

With very little preamble and no ado, here are 5 things you might not know about me:

1. the “A” in A. Clinton Ivy - it doesn’t stand for Any Clinton Ivy nor is it A of {A, B, C, or D} … much to my wife’s chagrin who would much rather send a clone on business trips. No, it stands for Albert - Albert Clinton is a family name. However, I’ve been Clint for so long (longer than I can remember) that I used to be horribly embarrassed when a new teacher would invariably use Albert instead of Clint. That’s no longer the case but if you call out ‘Albert’ and expect me to respond, you’ll be disappointed.
2. I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico and am thusly adverse to left-hand turns ;~), and am addicted to green and red chile (don’t even think of spelling it ‘chili’ - that’s some sort of stew with beans and meat that Texans and Chicagoans make). Every trip home I have to eat at Blake’s Lotaburger for a green chile cheeseburger, Dion’s Pizza for a slice or two, smothered in green chile and either Los Cuates, Papa Felipe’s or Garcia’s for Enchiladas with red chile.
3. I have a son, Michal (almost 7) who loves the Grand Canyon, NASCAR, Monster Trucks and Skyscrapers
4. I won an internet advertising campaign award in 2003
5. Obligatory: I studied classical languages (greek and latin), creative writing and biological anthropology in college - yep three things that have absolutely nothing to do with web analytics

So whom shall I tag…?

Mom, who has a blog and is WAY more interesting than I am

Chris Gemignani at Juice Analytics

Andrea Wiggins, whom I met at Emetrics last spring

George Sfarnas, author of Being Five, because I love the comic

Guy Kawasaki - why not?

Yep, that’s short-hand for Eric Talks Engagement. Eric gets one step closer to brass tacks by defining the activities that occur on his site, or with his content that are relevant and engaged - for him.

Here’s his list of activities, grouped into moderate engagement and high engagement sets (as defined by Eric):

Moderate-Value Activities

• Read my weblog
• Read about the Web Analytics Business Process
• Research web analytics jobs
• Add a link to my link database
• Read comments about my books
• Give me an email address
• Host a Web Analytics Wednesday
• Join the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group

High-Value Activities

• Consider buying one or more of my books
• Buy one or more of my books
• Read about any of my books
• Read about my Key Performance Indicator Worksheets
• Download a sample copy of one of my books
• Email me directly
• Submit a comment to my weblog
• Go to Amazon.com to check out my books

Now, score one for Eric for actually thinking through a framework for measuring engagement, and putting it into practice, but it’s late and I’m feeling nit-picky.
Because Engagement has been talked about so much lately in terms of Web 2.0 and ‘Social Media‘ I’m putting Eric’s listed activities through that lense. Of the 16 activities, only 5 measure social media engagement:

• Read my weblog
• Add a link to my link database
• Host a Web Analytics Wednesday
• Join the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group
• Submit a comment to my weblog

7 seem to be about commerce - dealing with buying Eric’s books

• Consider buying one or more of my books
• Buy one or more of my books
• Read about any of my books
• Read about my Key Performance Indicator Worksheets
• Download a sample copy of one of my books
• Go to Amazon.com to check out my books
• Read comments about my books

Two of them I would equate to traditional CRM efforts

• Give me an email address
• Email me directly

The last two I’m having a hard time categorizing, but my guess is they relate directly to the Eric T. Peterson brand

• Research Web Analytics Jobs
• Read about the Web Analytics Business Process

So, here’s the breakdown:

• Social Media Activities: 31.25%
• Commerce Activities: 43.75%
• CRM Activities: 12.5%
• Other (Brand) Activities: 12.5%

Ok, so Eric’s in a bit of a hybrid situation, which ‘traditional’ (web 1.0?) companies will also find themselves in where social media is just one of many things going on.

But the blogger in me says ‘Come On! Only five of the activities are related to the social aspect of the site AND only one of those five is of high engagement value?’

Eric you gotta get out of your traditional corporate shell! (Disclaimer: I’m a traditional corporate dog too)

Where are the subscriptions to your RSS feed and the associated click-backs?
Where are the track backs?
Where are the buzz-rankings (e.g. post/discussions picked up in other places)?
Let me put this another way, is engagement a practical measure for non-social web activities?

It seems like forever ago that Eric and I talked about engagement and how I expressed some frustration over Scoble’s post about the need for Engagement metrics. Haven’t we web analysts been talking about this like FOREVER (well maybe 18 months or so anyway).

At the time, Eric told me he was measuring engagement on his site and that he planned a blog post on the subject. So I held off because Eric had some real-world experience, and better tools for testing it out. So here we are, more than a month afterwards and that very busy man finally had a chance to get out his thoughts on his experimenting - yeah! Something to look at and noodle over.

Anyway, it’s time to get to work, so more thought on this will have to wait until later. In the meantime, go read Eric’s post and see what you think.