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

"... a must-read for anyone working in any form of engagement ..."

"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

***

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.

Scott Gould is an author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune Global 500 companies and international NGOs. He has spent 18 years working in a broad range of engagement contexts, from aviation to education, leadership development to national government, from media and entertainment to digital technology, and from event production to being a church pastor. Formerly he founded one of the first Twitter hashtag communities, and ran a top-10 rated business conference, before leading a diverse inner city church. He now advises his clients on engagement strategy, and helps them to develop enduring connections with their customers, employees and communities. Scott is chair of the UK chapter of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is also a poet, has a young family, and quite controversially, does not like cat memes.