Engagement Wins in Times of Trouble

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This is a story of Easter eggs, five months in a women's prison and customer engagement.

I just couldn’t think of a better image for engagement so this one will have to do.

Does everyone know Martha Stewart? For those of you who don't, I was trying to think of the best way to sum her up and this was really the only way I could do it.

Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith, Nigela Lawson and the Queen. She was the queen of daytime television for the States, she was the queen of how to fold various linens; she was the queen of what kind of colour to put on your wall. She was really the domestic goddess long before Nigela hit the screen here or in the States.

I first came across Martha Stewart when I used to run a design company, mostly print because it was in the early 90s, and my first trip to New York - and I still do this when I go there – I scoured all the news agents. They've got great news agents in New York, way better than here – just reams and reams of great looking magazines and this one caught my eye. It's Martha Stewart and given I wasn't really in to the kind of home-making she was into, it was really the design that caught my eye. I took it home. My wife is a primary school teacher and she's always looking for cool stuff to do with the kids. She was flicking through it and there was this great Easter egg thing in there.

On the basis of that we visited the website and had a look at it. It's a great website and this is what it looked like in 2001 [display slide], so this is a little bit later than when my wife and I first looked at it. It had lots and lots of community discussions going on. There was a TV programme at the same time and in the hours after the TV show, contributions to the discussion board used to be over 1,000. It was a really vibrant community and this became a very important benchmark for when we first started to develop some professional communities for our client, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Not that they discuss these kind of things, but the mechanisms for being able to engage and entice people and draw people in to the discussions became very, very important.

But it all went wrong. In 2002, Stewart was arrested for insider dealing. There was a tip-off that she received. She had shares in a pharmaceutical company that one of her friends owned and it looked like this company was going to go down the pan, which it eventually did actually, and her broker sold all her shares a couple of days before it tanked.

The Feds never actually made the insider dealing charge stick, but they did get her for lying to the federal police and as a consequence she was sent for five months to a West Virginia women's facility. It's quite a serious thing, going to prison, particularly if you're a millionaire like that. Apparently there were lots of yoga lessons and all sorts of things that she was undertaking in the prison.

So what did that do to her brand, which was entirely based on Martha Stewart as an incredibly upright home-maker that you could rely on? If you search the web, there's thousands of pastiches of her decorating her cell. Like this – 'simple decorating for small spaces' I always thought was quite good. 'Work where you live, live where you work.' These are pretty good, I like this. So, it really hit the brand and actually anyone who was following the stocks would notice that hers were 85% of their value. It really plummeted. In fact, usage on the site tanked and there was a big discussion about whether the company should dump Martha or drop her name from the company name Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. So there were discussion at the time of are we going to get rid of her, distance ourselves from her, wind the company up. And then, in my understanding of it, they began to notice that things didn't get quite as bad as anticipated. What they'd noticed, and the website was probably the best indicator of this, is that people were still talking, engaging with the site, embracing the activities that Martha Stewart represented because they had been doing that previously, it was part of their lives. If you've been watching a TV series and then go on to the online world and engage with your peers, that's something that you don't get rid of overnight just because someone gets locked away in the slammer.

The message board began to be redeveloped, encouraging new types of participation, new types of image upload and, again, began to reconnect with people. Thousands of people were still engaged with the website, investing hours more of their time on the site. Engagement proved to be very profitable and certainly a very lasting activity. They introduced new functionality that you begin to see across the rest of the web and - this one of the more interesting things – putting it in the language of home-making. Home-making is what Martha Stewart is really all about.

What do you do when you're a home-maker? Well, you'll think 'that's an interesting thing, I'll collect that'. This idea of being able to use 'collected items' rather than saved favourites – using the language that's the most appropriate for the customer.

They began to put new content in terms of new interactivity on the site, video began to be introduced. Gradually what you're seeing is Martha Stewart as a site, as a brand under the impact that this engagement is having is beginning to boost it again. The share prices are beginning to increase. Not quite back to what it was in the pre-scandal heights, but certainly getting very close to that.

And then lastly, making sure they kept going with some of the traditions of the past. If people know you for a particular thing, don't jettison what you've done in the past, build on it, make it better. Again, here you can see this is a regular thing. My wife regularly does the Easter Eggs with her school kids and now that we've got kids, it's great fun making posh Easter eggs with them.

They're confident now to reintroduce Martha in an overt way. She has her own blog. Sometimes it doesn't quite hit the mark with me - like 'the importance of fitting a good saddle'. This is partly about creating her persona on the website so you can see each of these things is a way of reintroducing the brand, re-connect with people and make sure that the expectations of what the customers have when they engage with you on the site are met fully.

So I'm making this out as quite a success and I think that if you look at the stats - this is the last year's worth of minutes stayed on the site – and it's pretty good, right? Last month the average was around 10 minutes. Most sites wouldn't get anywhere close to 10 minutes. If you make a comparison with the BBC, which actually is a very rich site, there it's nearly seven minutes. So they must be doing something right, engaging visitors in this way. There are more pages viewed on Martha Stewart than on the BBC. Again, the value of this kind of engagement you can really pick out in that it took them from one very troubled time into where we are now. Just as a kind of footnote to this now, the Martha Stewart share price has tanked in the last month and this is largely, in my understanding, to do with the downturn in the economy, particularly around the more obvious advertising and the implications that that's going to have.

But what's going to get them through? Well, actually it's going to be engagement of their audience. That's one of the lessons we tried to stress again and again within the book: engagement isn't just this activity that you want to undertake. In terms of when the economy get a little bit rougher, when you face a crisis that's not necessarily generated by the economy, what an engaged relationship allows you to do is partly to weather that storm, but also to emerge stronger than you would have been in a previous situation.

So, lessons? Well, first off, don't insider trade! Or at least, don't get caught lying.

Then, two very simple ones: engaged relationships are built, not bought. You can have a voucher campaign that will buy people into your site, but they won't be engaged with you necessarily. And, high levels of customer engagement can get you through tough times.