As NYU professor and author Adam Penenberg described on one panel, when people engage with each other (tweeting, writing on their walls, checking in, blog commenting, gaming) the body releases the chemical Oxytocin, also known as the hormone of love. The same hormone that bonds mothers to their newborns also increases empathy 13 percent in males. So, you could think of all the networking that takes place at SXSWi as a love fest of sorts. Certainly, for Seth Priebatsch, the founder of next big thing SCVNGR and keynote speaker, the future is all about engaging with others through the “gamification” of social apps and sites. If we only transform all challenges of the modern era – education, the environment – into a game that we all solve together, the world will be a better place. And this is a theme I heard throughout the event — education is broken, work is broken, social media is broken — now lets change the rules and play some games!

I appreciated Jason Brown of Zynga’s sentiment that “games are becoming indistinguishable from real life communication” and as I watched all attendees staring at their screens throughout the show this truth became self evident. But the funny thing about “South By” (as you should call it if you want to demonstrate street cred), is that it’s a cul de sac of future thinking that will eventually hit Main Street once everyone catches up. So, while Location Based Services (LBS) are the rage at the show, the market of smartphone users that actually use them is still immature. And by immature I don’t mean that they wear bright orange tee shirts with matching orange frame sunglasses (love that Priebatsch style). Watch the mobile LBS/gaming market take off as brands aim to increase engagement with consumers through loyalty-creating games that encourage them to “level up.”

But, lest we believe that people will play games without incentives, consider the promotion that Jill Okawa Fletcher of Virgin America did with LBS provider Loopt to drive people to check in at taco stands to win flights to Mexico. On the “Go Here, Do This” panel she shared with LivingSocial, Foursquare and Yelp! everyone agreed that “you need a big carrot” and that Facebook Places will be the check in hub for LBS. In counterpoint, in a panel on the true value of a Facebook fan, everyone concluded that it’s important to not focus on your brand’s most influential fans, and that giving away free ice-cream dilutes the value of a fan base. What’s most important is what you do with the fan (engagement, again). But it was beneficial to hear from Paul Ollinger of Facebook that the average fan spends $77 more than non-fan customers.

So if engagement via gaming, LBS and social media is the key for brands relating to consumers, the bar is even higher to produce content (stories, videos) that will create better engagement. Social isn’t about just creating pass-along viral buzz, it’s about dialogue, and the dialogue should never be just about the brand. This was made even clearer when I met my personal hero Victor Pineiro of Big Spaceship who posts for Skittles and was on a panel with the guys who created Whopper Sacrifice and American Express Open Forum. Their advice: fail and fail often. This is a process of constant reinvention. Conversational posts are 8-10 times more likely to get responses. Stories are not about us (brands). Focus on the topics that brands share with consumers because that’s what forms dialogue. If Oreo’s fan page can out-do Lady Gaga’s fan page in engagement with posts to the community, it’s more than just celebrity fueling engagement.

The same thoughts were expressed by Robert Brunner of Ammunition Group in his solo session “Ideas not Objects.” Product designer Robert Brunner has played a role in designing some of the seminal devices of our time: the Kindle and Beats by Dre headphones to name two. His philosophy of design is that every product must tell a story. “It doesn’t help to wrap a story around a bad idea. We get our stories from the community. The creation myth can no longer be a myth. Designer and storyteller need to work together. You cannot control your brand, you can only influence what people feel. Today, not taking risks is risky.”

“Content is still king” was heard from several during the show, but one risk-taker in particular hit it home: artist and designer Marc Ecko. He outlined his mathematical formula for authenticity. Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, he took a dizzying Prezi.com-powered presentation trip inside his own mind to uncover what defined his personal brand, on a personal road of discovery that has lead him to promoting UnlimitedJustice.com a cause to stop the use of paddling in corporal punishment in the 20 states that still permit it. He’s using the tools of outsider art and protest tactics to use social media for good and benefit education. Check out the site to stop the dropout rate from climbing.

The SXSWi show ended with the news that Owsley Stanley, the “Acid King” who ushered in the psychedelic movement of the ’60s, had died. In many ways, his passing was a passing of the torch to a new generation of adventurers gathering in Austin to tune in, log on, and check out (the modern era’s version of “tune in, turn on and drop out”). Comedian Marc Maron closed the festival with a live podcast of his WTF Show and he called Austin “Hipster Alamo” as the last bastion of cool in Texas. I prefer to think that the “Love In” lives on at SXSWi.

But, sometimes campaigns are not focused on direct response, but rather influencing upper-funnel stages such as awareness and consideration.  When this is the case, a best practice is to conduct pre- vs. post-campaign brand survey studies, but we can also utilize an audience engagement construct based on online behaviors that act as proxies for awareness and/ or consideration and be leading indicators of future economic value (leads, transactions).

There are a number of behaviors that can make up an engagement score – rich-media ad interactions (window expansions, video plays, utilizations such as calculators or games), homepage visitation (especially via post-impression response^†), landing page visitation, store/ branch locater activity, consumption of high-value content (reinforcing campaign messages), etc.

However, not all of these behavioral interactions are equally valuable depending upon campaign goals and the interaction’s respective place in the purchase funnel – visiting store locater results pages is an intuitively stronger indicator of purchase intent likelihood than visiting the campaign landing page or even the brand homepage or ad unit interactions.

To account for this differential value of interactions, each behavior can be weighted, respectively, to reflect each one’s relative value (say, on a scale from 0-2, or whatever is appropriate for the specific brand’s business).

Once a methodology is established, the engagement score can be utilized as the basis for gauging campaign responsiveness (via engagement yield = engagement score/ ad impressions) as well as financial efficiency (via cost per engagement = media cost/ engagement score) to guide campaign optimization decisions.

So, the next time, your client has a digital campaign focused on influencing upper-funnel activities, and you don’t have the time, funds, or interest in formally evaluating brand awareness and consideration measures from a brand survey study, consider behavioral engagement as a good, easily available success proxy.

What experiences have you had in using online behavior measures as gauges of success for upper-funnel digital campaigns…? What else would you consider…?

^†Post-impression (PI) response represents the target audience being exposed to online display advertising (OLA), not clicking on the ad (banner), but at a later time visiting the brand’s site and exhibiting the campaign’s goal behaviors (homepage visit, priority content consumption, order submission, etc.). PI response typically accounts for 60-90% of total campaign response.