Between Measuring Engagement and Measuring Resonance

In the early days of digital diplomacy research, scholars were enamored by “engagement metrics”. Given that digital diplomacy was closely associated with public diplomacy, and seeing as how public diplomacy mandated that diplomats “engage” with foreign populations, counting likes, Re-Tweets and comments seemed fruitful. By measuring “engagement metrics” one could finally measure the outcome of public diplomacy activities, an important advantage as such measurements eluded scholars and diplomats for decades. Countless studies published between 2012 and 2016 thus focused on comparing “engagement metrics” of different accounts and across different platforms.

Yet within a few years the measurement of “engagement metrics” came under heavy scrutiny as scholars realized that re-Tweets and comments actually offered little analytical value. If a tweet received 200 re-Tweets, did this mean that the tweet in question had impacted Twitter users’ worldviews? Was it a testament to closer ties between diplomats and their followers? Did it reveal any semblance of two-way interactions between diplomats and digital publics? The answer was a resounding no. In fact, some scholars went as far as to label “engagement metrics” as vanity metrics. The reason being that diplomats used these metrics to prove the efficacy of digital communications. Digital diplomacy units would disseminate memos outlining growth indicators in numbers of followers and numbers of likes per tweet while advocating for greater resources.

Notably, diplomats may have come to rely on engagement metrics given that digital diplomacy was still in its infancy and was still frowned upon by higher echelons within foreign ministries. There was serious, physical diplomacy and there was silly, digital diplomacy. The former helped shape the world, the latter was good for the occasional Selfie at a multilateral summit. Moreover, unlike any other unit within MFAs, digital diplomacy departments always had to justify their existence. No one in the French foreign ministry considered closing down the Africa Desk or shutting down the UN bureau. But downsizing digital departments was always an alluring way of meeting new budget cuts.

“Engagement metrics” were also abandoned by scholars as they could easily be manipulative or inflated using bots and automated software. What was required was a more robust method of analysis for, as Einstein famously said, “not everything that counts can be measured and not everything that can be measured, counts”. Take for example re-Tweets. A message from the US State Department could receive 10,000 re-Tweets. Yet if every re-Tweet was accompanied by an attack on the US, or if every re-Tweet included an attack on US diplomats, then re-Tweets could hardly be counted as indicators of engagement. This was also true of the number of comments. If a British tweet garnered 500 comments, and if all these comments were highly critical of the UK and its policies, then the numbers of comments by themselves meant very little. Most importantly, none of these metrics measured engagement in the sense of ongoing digital interactions between diplomats and connected publics, relationships that transformed connected publics into stakeholders with which diplomats could collaborate.

However, basic social media metrics could be used to measure Resonance. The term ‘Resonance’ differs from engagement. A message can be said to resonate with social media users if it leads to certain actions that indicate arousal or interest. For instance, if a tweet or a post causes an individual to stop scrolling through his feed, then the tweet may have resonated with the user at some level. Scholars could even try to distinguish between kinds of resonance. For instance, visual resonance, or an image that captures the attention of a user and leads them to stop scrolling; cognitive resonance, or a tweet that generates interest summoning the user’s attention; or even emotional resonance, such as a tweet that elicits an emotional response from the user be it anger, fear or hope. Finally, one could measure active resonance, when a tweet or a post led the user to take additional actions- like commenting or sharing the tweet.

Resonance is important in light of how social media has changed since the advent of digital diplomacy. In a crowded digital arena, populated by attention grabbing videos, clips and ads, summoning the attention of any user has become more difficult. Some have dubbed social media part of the “attention economy”, or an entire economy dedicated to grabbing and retaining the attention of a digital user long enough to sell him a product or a lie. In the attention economy, attention is the currency, and users constantly choose what content will grab their attention and be successfully monetized. As such, measuring Resonance is actually measuring diplomats’ ability to compete over the attention of users, and retain that attention long enough to deliver a message. Resonance is not a vanity metric but a metric adapted to the attention economy, the proliferation of digital networks and the financial logic now governing digital spaces including, but not limited to social media.

Resonance measurements could thus focus on three metrics. The first is attention grabbing or stopping users from scrolling onto other content. The second is measuring responses. Here scholars could focus on written comments and emoji responses. Written comments are indicative of greater resonance, yet the question remains what is actually written in a comment, whether it aligns or misaligns with the intended message and even whether comments are long and thoughtful or short and hateful. On other platforms like Facebook, emojis could be indicative of resonance as users quickly comment on the content at hand be it with a smiley or anger emoji. These emojis matter as they are indicative of grabbing users’ attention and of subsequent action. For diplomats and scholars, Resonance could be a way to rediscover analytics and come up with new methods to measure attention grabbing.