Having a website has become a true necessity nowadays. Having a website of your own equals entering into an invaluable communication environment. There are at least 7 reasons why it is highly advisable for you to be present online:

Represents your personal profile
A website can be your virtual portrait, showing off your personal self to the world on a 24/7 basis.  Among the most popular ways of presenting your personality online is keeping a webblog (otherwise known as online diary) or a photo gallery, where your friends can stay up-to-date with your daily living.

Spreads your voice across the world
A website can be your global “tribune” where you are able to share your knowledge, experience and enthusiasm with people who have common interests, but with whom you might not otherwise have crossed paths. A very popular idea-voicing tool is the discussion board, better known as “forum”. You can also have a guestbook on your site, where people can discuss your postings.

RIPE (Revenue/Income Per Employee). A measure that I like to use to benchmark the health of a company. What does Revenue/Income Per Employee show? For one, it indicates the scalability of these companies and the profitability of the same model. Companies with high RIPE have a business model that does not require it to keep increasing manpower (cost) as it grows revenue/income. Hence allowing a model which can be duplicated and grown as necessary without the limitation of having more personnel.

Working for a company with high RIPE also means technically you have a better chance of being paid a higher salary, afterall a company cannot pay staff more than it is making in revenues right?

I've included this second chart of net income as some companies like Amazon, enough of talking about Groupon so from the last articles so let's look at Amazon now. May have high revenues per employee that almost match Microsoft but due to the nature of business there are a lot of other costs involved such as the logistics, cost of goods etc. Hence the stark difference in the translated rankings. Though I'm not really sure why Linkedin has such a drastic difference as compared to Facebook. Might say a thing or two about each business model when you look at it in depth.

I've added here another chart on their respective revenue streams in their largest operating segment for an added perspective. Similarly, I still wonder what is Linkedin's main operating segment if it's not advertising.

Following from the last article on the definition of Reward, I'll first like to clarify that the article sets to define and not to refute the use of Rewards to incentivize consumer behavior. I am myself a large advocate of the use of rewards to achieve marketing bottom line. Simply looking at TuxSeeDo, it's not disguise that the product has a huge reward element to it. Before discussing about the effective use of rewards and its impact, I'll briefly cover the definitions of Engagement and Loyalty. We can further discuss more practical applications of REAL to improve marketing efficiency. The idea here being to maximize bottom line results on marketing campaigns.

What is Engagement? Without the use of convoluted matrixes, graphs and charts that modern marketing studies bring about. I'll like to simply define it with 2 factors. Frequency and Time Spent.

Frequency being the more straight forward of the two being how often does your audience interact with your brand. You may not visit your dentist or buy new clothes everyday but as frequently as you think about your teeth and need fashion advice, where do you go. You kind of get the point that interaction with a brand does not only occur at point of sale or even just before or after the sales. It happens as a day to day activity, even with something as simple as viewing the Calvin Klein ad while traveling to work on the bus. Here's some old(2005) findings about media interactions that an average person interacts with on a daily basis.

1. About 30 percent of the observed waking day was spent with media as the sole activity versus 20.8 percent for work activity, while an additional 39 percent of the day was spent with media while involved in some other activity
2. In any given hour no less than 30 percent of those studied were engaged in some way with television, and in some hours of the day that figure rose to 70 percent
3. While television is still by far the dominant medium in terms of the time average Americans spend daily with media at 240.9 minutes, the computer has emerged as the second most significant media device at about 120 minutes
4. About 30 percent of all media time is spent exposed to more than one medium at a time
5. People ages 18 to 24 spend less time online than any other age group except those older than 65
6. Levels of concurrent media exposure were higher among those 40 to 65 than people 18 to 39
7. Women spend more time multitasking with two or more types of media than men
8. Use of the Web, e-mail and phones is substantially higher on Fridays than any other day of the week

Though I believe that some of this information is outdated (like I seriously doubt point 3 still applies, especially with Facebook and iPhones), the average individual spends so much time interacting with various media that marketing budgets are in the billions of dollars just so that brands can maximise frequency of interactions, until... they realise there's a better way to do it (read: P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It's Free To Advertise On Facebook). And so we have the likes of Fan pages on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and every social platform you can think of and viral campaigns of photos, videos, memes of all kinds circulating all as part of marketing.

Besides the frequency, there is the Time Spent. From a web analytics point of view, you don't just want to ask how often a user comes back to your site, you also want to ask how much time they spend on your site and if they are commenting or simply reading. I'll like to put an emphasis on time on site rather than the action of commenting or simply viewing. While some may argue that a user that a user that is participating is better engaged than one who is just viewing. While in some sense true, I'll like to classify that action of participation with "vested interest" later covered with loyalty. A user who has spent 15 mins reading and pondering upon your article is no less engaged than one who has spent that same 15 mins reading and writing a comment in response to your article. Would you say one who spends every hour writing an update to Facebook is more engaged than one who checks Facebook every hour to read that same update? I'll say both are equally engaged. Removing the subjective elements of types of action allows one to clearly see how effectively engaging or not a marketing action is.

Engagement, if I may put it, like a relationship. The more often you meet and the longer you spend time each time you meet the more engaged you probably are with the other party. Have better engaged customers, hence the idea is to increase the frequency and the length of each "meeting". However, more engaged does not necessarily mean more meaningful nor more involved. We will at a later article discuss ways to better engage your clients with methods including games.

During one of my early days interview, my interviewer once told me that, "A client is like your girlfriend." You've put in the right Reward to win the customer. You've put in the time to engage the relationship. Now... can you keep her?

Let me have your comments on Engagement. I'm tracking my frequency and time on site since the start of the series and I'll see if writing it has helped the engagement value of my blog. If you are wondering about the coffee vouchers, yes, I'll be honouring them at the end of the series, though I did find a small problem with the mechanics.

REAL (Rewards, Engagement And Loyalty). It may seem a little rhetorical and you might already know (or not) that these three concepts serve very different roles and have very different effects for marketing. Yet in today's myriad of advertisements and campaigns, not to mention the number of Social Media and user generated stuff going on, the correct application of each of these concepts to achieve the desired effect is could, though it should, be a difficult and often misunderstood. Here's a little personal take with examples on what's what and hope it will help you in conceptualising your marketing efforts for 2012.

Rewards - Yes as the term suggest, the use of rewards/gifts to induce a certain behaviour. Such as giveaways, lucky draws, freebies and to a large extend points and miles. What can this do for you in marketing? Like holding out a candy in front of a donkey, it allows you to attract and steer your audience towards a certain behaviour.

2 major considerations come into play here. First the candy and secondly the donkey. Well of course, you have to be holding out the right candy in front of the right donkey for the donkey to follow the candy. Simply put you've got to hold out a reward that your target audience wants. How far (hard/easy) do you put out that candy will also determine if your donkey will try for it. Make it too easy and you might find yourself out of candy before you get the donkey where you want. Make it too hard and the donkey might not be following you at all.

This however should not be mistaken with Engagement and Loyalty. You CAN'T make engaged nor loyal customers with Rewards. So up to this point your miles card, stamp for free coffee card, lucky draw DOES NOT make a loyalty program. As much as most use such their main thrust of their loyalty marketing. It's not. That's why people switch cards/companies once they find a better rewards program. However, appropriate rewards can allow you to induce (buying) behaviour, that you want to achieve.

In short rewards have a very short term view. I give, you want therefore you do. Think about and start noticing the use of rewards around you. Free gifts, free parking, white papers, FREE iPad!(The current hot favourite amongst audiences of all age groups and hence marketers). It's extremely effective in traffic spikes and attracting the attention of the audience who is really attracted by the reward, and distracting them from the point that you are trying to push sales. Afterall the bottomline of marketing is still sales. However... Once I don't give you don't do. Unless...

Engagement and Loyalty comes into play. Watch this space as I write about what Engagement is about, what Loyalty is about, how do we effectively combine the three into an effective customer capture campaign.

Now that you've read about rewards, discounts especially ridiculous discounts like Groupon is in fact Reward marketing. Why doesn't it work for some? Well because once the reward (ridiculous discount) is taken away, the customer is not buying. To effectively capitalise on the Reward behaviour, one has to also prepare an engagement and loyalty strategy.

If you are following this series please leave a comment below or like this post. Since we are on the topic of rewards, I'll give away 2x $5 coffee vouchers to 2 lucky winners. It's a small candy but it's appropriate for the exercise.