#Chapter 3 - Stakeholder engagement
- Mo Ca
- Dec 7, 2018
- 11 min read
How to actively participate within your network as to make your target audience to engage with you?
In the previous chapter, you have learned what the psychology of networks is and understood why people want to participate in various networks. Next, you also learned how to maintain your network and to respond to the needs of your community. Now, it is time to go deeper to actively participate and identify your diverse stakeholders within your networks. By identifying them, you will be able to make them engage with you and how to interact with them effectively. Stakeholder engagement is essential in building trust between your organization and the target audience. Therefore, this chapter will help you to understand what engagement is and how to participate in your network.
" This chapter will help you to actively participate within your social network, as you have learned the basics of networking in previous chapters.. If you can engage effectively with your target audience and understand their needs, you will be able to build a trustworthy community. Let’s get started with this new chapter written by YouPro team."
What is a stakeholder and
who are your stakeholders as a startup?
A stakeholder can be a person, a company, an organization or group that has interest or involvement in your startup. They are directly or indirectly affected by the activities of a company or people who have any interest in these activities. They have an influence in your community and on your values as a company (Business Dictionary, Unknown). One of your goals, as an upcoming startup, is to create and establish a lasting relationship with your stakeholders.
Because no matter how smoothly your project runs internally, without taking stakeholders into account, things can become complicated. For example, you may not be able to recognize possible obstacles or fail to see the opportunities. You might also head for the failure of the project as you don't bring the right people on board with you. Especially in creating a start-up, you already know that you have to struggle with time and budget restrictions. Thus, you often focus all your time and attention on internal processes and on stakeholders in the middle of the value chain of the start-up (suppliers, finance and customers). We are pretty sure you know some of your relevant stakeholders already, however, we will focus on the relevant stakeholders that are essential in the early stage.
Investors: You are interested in investing your capital securely and profitably. A good example is banks or other larger companies. They invest in your idea and get a dividend at the end of the year. The best way to attract such stakeholders is to take the initiative. You have to make yourself known so that potential investors hear from you and feel like investing in you or your idea. We already talked to you about it in the previous chapter in the Best Practice part when we get insights from Eline Krommenhoek.
Suppliers: Suppliers need a solvent and reliable customer to be successful themselves. Especially as a young graduate, you have little experience working with other companies. Therefore, the selection of the right supplier is the key. Take your time, visit the suppliers, talk to them and compare the most potential suppliers with each other.
Potential customers and early adopters want high-quality product or service at good conditions. The customer himself is probably one of the most important stakeholders for any company. Only the customers make your business idea meaningful and useful. If you have no customers, you generate no turnover. Without turnover, your business idea is worth nothing. So, you need to maintain regular contact with your customers. Always be up to date with the needs of your customers. The best way to do this is to make personal contact and talk to your customers. But we will talk about it in the other chapters. Therefore, these stakeholders would be the most important part of your networks.
Media (social or traditional ones) can also be considered as stakeholders. These media will allow you to be better known by people. Taking into account that you don’t have a lot of money yet, the best solution is to work on your social media strategy. Because with a good one, you can build awareness in people’s mind and, then, maybe attract other classical media.
Other networks, business or professionals are also important stakeholders. We already discussed in previous chapters that you need to connect to professional networks in order to gain in credibility and get some good insights. You can, of course, connect to other networks or even incubators (a company who accompany the startups) as well.
We hoped this part helped you to understand what the stakeholders are and on which stakeholders you should focus on as an upcoming startup. Knowing them is the first step, but now, you need to know how to make them engage with you.
What is Engagement?
We assume that you have read and heard it everywhere, that engagement with your community is the key to build a long-term network. But what does it exactly mean? Despite the use of this common term, it is one of the most misunderstood terms in marketing. According to Brodie, engagement is not simply interacting with a brand, but also a psychological state in which a customer is functioning with a brand or organization (Brodie, 2013). It is more than one action, it is a lasting connection between you and your stakeholders. In marketing, the type of engagement is called “customer/consumer-engagement” but there are several other dimensions of engagement. This is mainly because people engage with a platform for various reasons (to have information, to pass time, and so on). To this, engagement can be categorized into three groups: cognitive, emotional and behavioural.
Cognitive engagement
Cognitive engagement is about the awareness of a person during the engagement process. This type of engagement means that every person has a goal in mind while interacting in a platform. A good example is the usage of Linkedin. People generally use this platform as a form of self-promotion. The users are also more aware of the benefits that the engagement can generate.
Emotional engagement
Emotional engagement is about the types of connection that people have with a brand like if they like it, if they want to know more about, it if they just heard about it and so on. When looking at a brand like Nike people automatically think of ‘sports’. This is because of carefully created promotions by Nike which spread this message towards people emotionally linked, tied to sports in general. Nowadays brands put more emphasis on these values.
Behavioural engagement
Behavioural engagement is a dimension that is easily measured. When people start to engage with your brand, they start to leave likes, comments and start sharing your content. These are called “behavioural manifestations”. In chapter 5, we will discuss several tools which can help you measure these types of engagement. Behavioural engagement is not entirely online, however. Attending your events also count as a behavioural manifestation.
"The engagement rate measures the number of responses and interactions that content on social media generates from users” (Jaakonmäki, Müller, Vom Brocke; 2017)
When it comes to the engagement on the social media, we often hear about the engagement rate. It can be calculated by measuring the percentage of people that react to a post by liking or commenting it. Those reactions signal the interest people have with your post or even with your startup. Of course, as an upcoming startup, you want this rate to be as high as possible.
How to encourage social media engagement?
We think you get that engagement should be one of your main goals when reading the first part. However, it is a very long process, so do not expect immediate results from your content. There are various factors which drive social media engagement. Those factors help by creating a higher user-engagement: (Jaakonmäki, Müller, Vom Brocke; 2017)
- Creator-related features are for example the number of followers, their age, and so on. Research has shown that the higher the number of followers, the higher the engagement rate is. It is not really a surprise as the higher your number of followers is the more people you will possibly reach. However, even though it might seem obvious, it is still important to keep this in mind because thanks to this, you become better known.
- Contextual features can be factors like time, location and so on. The engagement rate also depends on when you post your content. Some days are better to post something than other days. For instance, on Sunday, you will most likely gain more interaction with your content as people are not working and have free time to spend.
- Content features are text, visual and audio content. By using visuals, emoticons and hashtags, you will create a higher engagement rate. The most interaction with the content happens when you use more than 11 hashtags with your content. But we will talk about what relevant content to post in the next chapters.
To help you in creating engagement from your stakeholders, we have chosen 5 useful tips:
1. Ensure brand consistency
Make sure that your content is easily recognizable to your readers. Creating a brand guide is an easy way to do this. By listing your font, colours and tone of voice you create consistency in your posts.
2. Promote social good
An important aspect of engagement is ‘reciprocity’. A brand is supposed to give back not to just the consumers but also to society. You can, for example, partnered with organizations which make an effort to help those in need.
3. Care for your customers
Once you have established your community, ask how you can help your customers. This also includes the usability of your platform. Ask what keeps them from engaging with your platform and how you can help. Also look for overlapping interests in your target audience. (we will talk about it later on).
4. Incorporate authentic storytelling
Make sure that the content you are posting is in line with your brand values. Also, encourage your customers to share their connections with your brand.
5. Create thoughtful leadership
Make sure that you are a leader in your field. Show your capabilities and show what makes you stand out in your field.
So now you got some tips on how to participate in your network and make people engage with you. If you have the impression we did not get as deep as you might have wanted, don't be disappointed: we will discuss engagement and interaction with your network in other chapters again. For instance, in chapter 6, we will talk about co-creation and User Generated Content. If you can't wait to learn about it, click here. What you can gain from your stakeholders is not only engagement but also Para-Social Interaction (PSI). We will talk about it in the last part of this chapter.
What is Para-Social Interaction?
Your followers and fans are stakeholders as well. Indeed, stakeholders are not always on the business side of things. With those type of stakeholders, you should have a more personal and psychological kind of relationship. Even without knowing your fans personally (in fact you won’t be able to know them all), there is still a relationship that can be built.
Para-Social Interaction theory (PSI) is a term coined by Horton and Wohl (2006). In 1956 this was mostly done through the means of mass communication, such as radio and television. People tuned in to see their favourite host and not necessarily their favourite show. Para-social relationships are meant to resemble face-to-face interaction, they are however one-sided. In a para-social relationship, only one person puts in energy, interest and time. The person on screen is however unaware of this given energy. This is most often the case with celebrities or public persons. The one-sided friendship is created between you, the startup, and the user of the PSI. It develops an interpersonal relationship, which means a relationship between two people.
It might seem strange that people think they are having some sort of relationship with a person that they haven’t met in person. This is however quite easily explainable when we take a look at how the human psyche works if you remember the previous chapter. People love to make social connections: it is one of our basic-instincts. Our brain was not made to separate a “real” person from a person on a screen. Our brain engages with these personas as if it were an actual person. The consumer knows that this interaction is not real, their brain, however, does perceive it as a real one.
As said before the PSI mostly occurred with hosts in mass-communication. In 2018 this has partly shifted towards bloggers and online persona. The distance between the two parties has slightly decreased. An online persona is more approachable. People used to write letters who were received a couple of weeks later. Nowadays the person is one button away. People can use media outlets such as Facebook or Instagram to get a real-time interaction with the influencer. This has allowed people to create a more intimate and stronger relationship. Ok, you are not a blogger or an online persona, but if you try to get close to your audience, you might create in them the need to use PSI. We often found that PSI is a result of a form of loneliness and isolation, but that is not true. Recent studies show that these kinds of relationships mean that followers found peace and happiness in a community – your community maybe. They connect with you on a personal level, relate to what you are going through and even make new friends within your community. (Unknown, 2014).
Therefore, using PSI as a startup for branding and marketing purposes seems like you take advantage of your audience. But it can help people find a sense of belonging in the online world that they do not find in reality. And this online environment is becoming more and more interactive so you should use it. Who knows how the contact will be in another 60 years?
Best practice from
the team Youpro
In this chapter, you learned who your main stakeholders are and how to participate in your network, how to interact with them, as well as to make them engaged with you. To illustrate the importance to connect with your stakeholders and to networking, we created a device. We advise you to see the video we have made at first and. Then, we will explain to you more about this “Idea Sphere”.
We realised 2 months ago that when you are working in a startup, you always need to find new ideas. You are always doing brainstorming with your colleagues and you put on big white wall diverse ideas on post-it notes. The main problem is you might forget about certain ideas. But what we also figured out is that those ideas can be shared between startups and, therefore, be useful for other people. Indeed, the startup spirit is a spirit of ideas! That is why we thought about this Idea Sphere.
It is a sphere that all your stakeholders can have - other young professionals and startups will certainly be the most interested. So how does it work? You just need to shake it and a new idea appears. It can be something you shake on a daily basis but, actually, you can do it as often as you want. What is also very cool with that object is that those ideas come from you and your stakeholders and you don't lose them when it disappears from the screen: it is saved in an open file that you also share with them.
This device will not only provide you and your stakeholders some fresh ideas, but it will also allow you to connect with all of your stakeholders. You can, for instance, share an idea you found interesting in one of your social platforms with the #IdeaSphere and create a complete community around this object. Therefore, it is also a great tool for you in networking with your stakeholders.
Now you are able to identify who your stakeholders are and how to make them engage with you. In the next chapters, we will get deeper into how to make your community, not only to get engaged but to encourage them to participate online. Most importantly, by understanding the engagement motives and how to encourage it, you can effectively send your message to your target audience. This will create a positive image as the people in your community will feel connected or find a common ground with you. In the next chapter, you will get to know how to create spreadability for your content. Because engagement is important for sure, but so are participation and interaction.
Team YouPro
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