The Shape of Engagement: The Art of Building Enduring Connections with Your Customers, Employees and Communities

“I love every model in this book.” – B. Joseph Pine II, author of The Experience Economy (Harvard Business Review Press)

“Relationships matter. In the early days of Twitter we did all we could to build enduring connections with users – and it worked. This book shows you how to do the same.” – Claire Diaz-Ortiz, award-winning author (One Minute Mentoring, Twitter for Good) and Silicon Valley innovator

“An excellent, insightful read. This book should sit on the shelf next to your other go-to books for strategic and tactical advice.” – Richard Newton, author of The Management Consultant (Financial Times)

“…a guide useful for any executive or individual seeking to understand the fundamental elements and importance of engagement” – Bruce Bolger, President of The Enterprise Engagement Alliance

Engagement is the big buzz word today: experts tell us we should be doing it, the research says people want it, and the companies that are doing it are growing from it – to the tune of 29.9% increase in stock price year on year.

Yet. For all the talk of it, do you still shrug your shoulders in bewilderment and ask yourself what earth is engagement? Do you know how to go beyond mere tactics and make it work at a strategic, consistent level? Is your senior management team onboard, or confused about the benefits of engagement? And critically, do you know how to make it work for you and your organisation?

Enter The Shape of Engagement: the result of 18 years work across all the professional frontiers of engagement. It has been eight years in the making, redrafting and deconstructing almost two decades of experience into seven profoundly simple frameworks that demystify what engagement is, how it happens, and how to strategically create enduring relationships with your customers, employees and communities.

In The Shape of Engagement, expert consultant and international speaker Scott Gould will reveal to you:
– how engagement is already at work your in business and your brand, and indeed, is at work while you read this description!
– what five things motivate engagement, and what’s getting in the way of you engaging deeper
– the difference between engagement, connection and participation, and why a click is NOT engagement
– what the three universal processes of engagement are, and how to harness them
– how to discern what level of engagement maturity your organisation is operating at
– where your customers, employees and members are in their own engagement journey
– what the six psychological steps of engagement are, and what strategies to use at each stage
– how to implement engagement at an enterprise level

Best of all, it’s a process that you can quickly learn and apply with just a little bit of focussed effort.

Using the experience and insight from working in a broad range of industries as diverse as media and entertainment, aviation, education, local councils, advertising agencies, tourism, national government, digital marketing, youth work, and even from being a church minister, Scott will show you how to put the shapes of engagement into practice, so that you never again scratch your head wondering what to do to engage.

This book is a must-read for anyone working in customer engagement, brand engagement, employee engagement, community engagement, and enterprise engagement.