As the social web evolves, it’s only natural that there’s a focus on improving the discovery experience for users. Enter Engagio, a new tool specifically targeted at finding content with the most real engagement. Several online tools rely strongly on the basic social gestures such as Likes, Shares or Re-Tweets to power the discovery process. And while this has been effective, a major drawback is the potential to still generate a lot of noise that could, in some cases, drown out content that’s garnered a lot of social engagement.
And that’s where Engagio is different. Now to the disclaimer part–Shelly and I became friends via the V3 blog (and because of Twitter stalking), and, knowing that I’m the community manager for Engagio, she asked me to write a piece about the platform for you guys. So here goes.
I’m biased (of course), but I think you’ll like how Engagio not only helps filter noise from your social streams, it also helps you discover where your friends are engaging. Let’s take a look.
Introduction to Engagio
As a starting point, Engagio acts as your social inbox by unifying your social conversations across the web and social networks. In addition, Engagio reveals articles where your friends/contacts are conversing. Discovering via conversations is a new approach. Not only am I discovering interesting content through these conversations–I’m also gaining new insights about the individuals related to their comments on different topics. This is awesome because it opens the door for social engagement with them across several touch points and is also an important step in building or nurturing an online relationship. Let me show you more.
I. Engagement Discovery Dashboard
This page has a panel in the middle that streams conversations from your contacts or anyone you’re following. Engagio has already integrated with the major social networks such as Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Disqus, Foursquare, YouTube and many others. On the dashboard, you’ll see the aggregated conversations from these sources. This stream has a high signal-to-noise ratio because it focuses on the conversations and not the entire social firehose. For example, a tweet by a contact will only appear in the stream if it’s part of a conversation, not simply because it was shared or re-tweeted. And you can reply, share, view the original post, follow a conversation or reveal the context around it directly from Engagio.
Bottom line: Quickly identify where your friends are conversing and discover top commented articles from a single dashboard.
II. Profile Page
Each Engagio user gets an automatically generated profile page that, in my opinion, is one of the best social identities directory on the web. Of course, I am biased here, so I’d appreciate hearing what you think about the profile page if you check it out. The Engagio profile page provides a stream of your recent conversations, a statistical breakdown of your interactions across these networks, who you’re interacting with and what sites on which you’re engaging.
Bottom line: Engagio is a one-stop destination to get a comprehensive footprint on a user’s social identities, who they’re influenced by and interacting with and a breakdown of the sites on which engagement is happening.
III. Popular Discussion Newsletter
Engagio’s daily newsletter delivers a summary of ‘popular discussions from your friends.’ This is an incredibly productive resource especially for busy days when you don’t have the time to browse the Engagio site but still want to engage in potentially important discussions. It’s kind of a permanent version of LinkedIn’s “who’s viewed your profile” and “who’s shared your content” … and when you don’t have to go seek out that information, but instead, it’s delivered to you on a daily basis, it’s one less thing to worry about.
Bottom line: You can keep up with the most important conversations even on busy days when you barely have time to breathe, much less see what’s happening on your social nets. Engagio brings it to your inbox.
IV. Search and Alerts
This is a cool new feature that we like a lot. Search and Alerts allows you to search the commentsphere and social discussions based on search keywords. (I think this might be the part my geeky, data-loving friend, Shelly, likes the best). Then, you create an email alert that allows you to stay up-to-date on what interests you.
Bottom line: Mine social conversations for specific keywords and mentions and get that data delivered to you regularly in email alert form. Whether this helps you with your lead generation efforts or brand reputation management or customer service (or a myriad of other things), this is valuable data, delivered to your inbox.
Start Social Discovery Through Conversations
There you have it. An overview of how I use Engagio and some thoughts on how you might be able to use it for your business and/or as part of the tools you use to serve your clients. What do you think? Does this seem like a valuable tool? If you’d like to know more, I’d love to hear from you.
Abdallah Al-Hakim (@abdallahalhakim) is a consummate social web commenter. As Engagio’s social web evangelist and online community manager, his presence is felt almost everywhere the topics of social engagement or online commenting are being discussed. Abdallah is a PhD trained biochemist with over 10 years of biomedical research experience in North America and Europe. Check him out on Engagio.
