I’ve had the pleasure of working in paid, unpaid, and earned media—mostly within the context of marketing or external communications—so I have a wide range of opinions on what it really costs to bring content-based strategies to market. Invariably, I’ve found that most people focus a little too much on what numbers are available; it’s not wrong, it’s just myopic. There are other, potentially greater, costs.

That’s certainly the case in engagement marketing, that flavor-of-the-month label that’s tossed around to make digital marketers and guys with soul patches feel more professional about what they do. I work in this field, so yes, I’m joking. But not about the soul patches.

A big hippo the industry has wrestled with is how to assign numbers to engagement marketing activities, and while that’s an important endeavor, I’m not here to argue one or another approach or debate the relative ROI of a given tactic. I’m not a CMO (I’ll edit this once it happens, rest assured), and I have an eight-month-old who takes most of my free time. Besides, everything I need to know about the real cost of engagement marketing I learned while running a coffeehouse. Read More…