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

by Scott Gould

Do you know how to successfully engage with your customers, employees and communities?

The answer is probably no. While engagement is one of the biggest buzz words around, and one of the most needed things in our fast changing world, most executives and managers shrug their shoulders in bewilderment as to what it actually is, and how it actually works.

But no more.

In this short but incisive book, expert consultant and speaker Scott Gould demystifies and breaks down engagement into seven profoundly simple shapes that explain the mysteries behind what makes people form enduring connections with ideas, brands, organisations, and each other.

Eight years in the making, and drawing on almost two decades of experience, Scott will reveal to you:
- What makes engaging companies outperform their unengaging counterparts by 29.9% increase in stock price year on year
- What's getting in the way of your engagement succeeding, and why trying to "get" people to engage doesn't work
- Why a click is NOT engagement, and what the difference is between participation, connection, and interaction
- What the three types of engagement are, and how to tell if they are at work in your organisation
- What the six psychological steps of engagement are, and what strategies to use at each stage
- What truly motivates people to engage
- How to operationalise engagement within an enterprise

Using the experience and insight garnered 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.

Get to ready to learn, once and for all, the shape of engagement.

Genres: Business

158 pages, Paperback

Published September 19, 2017

Reviews

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and unusual professional book. Engagement is an important topic and a word much used without really being fully understood.

Before I go any further I ought to own up to being a biased witness as I am an acquaintance of Scott, my name is on the cover with a review and I got a free copy! However, this isn't unique and I try to be completely honest in my reviews.

I am interested in engagement. This book peels it apart into a set of models, all memorably described in terms of a series of shapes. These models give a framework to think about and a language in which to discuss engagement. An excellent help - as otherwise discussions about engagement tend to become meandering and somewhat meaningless explorations without direction and sense. This book gives the toolkit to avoid this. For me, the best bits are the simplest models at the beginning of the book, but that may be just because my own understanding is somewhat simplistic. Those with deeper thoughts about engagement may prefer some of the more complex models.

[Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had the opportunity to meet Scott and it was great to experience his personality reflected in the text. He has some interesting actionable thoughts on Engagement that I really appreciate. The book is a neat and memorable collection of frameworks that will help you understand and build your own meaningful engagement strategy (refreshingly unrelated to the usual suspects connected to facebook likes, reach and clicks). I wish I had this book as a reference when I was still in the trenches at my old Advertising agency where I was developing campaign strategies for brands. That said, a lot of the thoughts shared here can be just as useful for when you launch a new application or any other area where you need to kick off and build momentum around engagement.

[ylva kravis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book itself is great. Marshall Manson summarizes this very well by saying that this book is a tidy package of thinking, frameworks and practical advice.
But I wish I'd read it before meeting Scott in real life - he is an amazing speaker, great storyteller, and an amazing persona, and that knowledge had set my expectations wrong.
I easily see myself picking this book up once again now and then in order to refresh my memory, but for the initial read, I was homesick for the inspirational feeling he brings along to his presentations.

[Iva Grigorova · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is very easy to read. It gives a full analysis of engagement, of all aspects of engagement. It shows how the process of engagement starts and how it ends or continues. It has an interesting point of you for people who are looking into engagement for better business or personal relationships.