Everyone these days either wants to engage with you, or wants to be engaged with. Companies engage with their employees and their customers to build value, new products, etc, while governments and government agencies engage with their citizens to strengthen the democratic process. But what does engagement really mean?

Does joining a Facebook group associated with a cause / corporation mean that you’re engaged?

Or does posting an online consultation process like this one mean that you’re really engaging people?

Evidently, it’s a relatively ambiguous term. A colleague of ours over at D-Code makes a good point when he differentiates between engagement and investment – the latter indicating a defined input of time/money/effort into an activity, rather than just pushing “join” as many Web 2.0 tools tend to incent. Thus, what’s important is the conversion of the passively engaged into the invested.

But on the organizational side, and in particular, in the public sector, what’s the flip side of that conversion process and user-investment?

I for one see it as a process issue. As a user invests his or her time into a cause/issue, their ROI is dependent on the organization’s application of that investment. So if an organization opens up their processes to attract citizen/constituent opinion and ideas, the ROI will be positive only if the resulting policy/product reflects those inputs and the process with which they were arrived at in a transparent manner.

Organizational-led engagement in the Web 2.0 space is subsequently much more than just using new tools to communicate with target populations. Rather, it’s about transforming the processes by which stakeholders interact with your organization so that those interactions, and the evolution and path of their inputs, can be seen as important components of the end result.