We couldn’t agree more with Mr Vaidyanathan’s views in this article published by Economic Times. Our experience talking to some brands can be summarized as follows. They agree that online engagement is important and highly impactful, but they are reluctant to invest the time, are happy with the status quo, and are comfortable thinking that this can be postponed to some time in the future.. Online engagement is held to a far higher “ROI” standard compared to advertising even if its cost is a small fraction of the traditional advertising budget.

With the support and impetus given by folks such as Mr Vaidyanathan, the powerful force of Engagement Marketing will surely come to be part of the mainstream sooner rather than later. The concluding part of the article carries the gist:

“An even better approach would be to use the force to work for you….

What is enigmatic about user generated content is that it is not just self perpetuating, the views are self balancing. Try posting a loaded view on Wikipedia, in a matter of minutes another user comes along to correct it.

At the end of the day, pooled content is good for the consumer; none is wiser than the collective, and none is wiser than the crowd. That’s good for service providers too, for it gives vital feedback. You’ve heard of soft launch of products in the market, you could really soft launch services on the net, because the user will define it for you.

Finally, user generated content is not just more information, it’s more credible. We can discuss the trappings, but can’t hide from the wisdom of the collective. Better to harness it. “