Nick ONeill (Social Times), Mike Sego ((fluff)Friends), Keith Schacht (42 Friends LLC), Tim O’Shaughnessy (Hungry Machine), Zach Allia (Free Gifts) spoke on a panel about user engagement at GSP West 2008.

How to measure engagement? At first, Facebook reported installs, now it’s number of average daily user. General concensus that this is somewhat misleading.

Are you getting lots of daily visits, lots of new users with churn or are you getting frequent return visits? Time spent on site, frequency of revisit, page views, content generation are also all good measures.

Why do some applications stick vs fizzle? Active work on the app, freshness and up to date features help. Things that provide an ongoing service tend to stick, one time use tends to fizzle. Freshness helps, people don’t want to revisit the same old stuff.

Little Green Patch held out as an application that has done a great job of always giving you something to do next. PacRat trading card game – amazing art, with really original gaming aspects that drive use. Someone else said PacRat is way too hard to learn. Bumpersticker is another application that has been great for users. It’s user driven content that drives freshness that scales.

Building gaming effects into the applications really helps drive engagement. Levels, leader boards. Well designed asynchronous game aspects can be really helpful in driving lots of use. Scrabulous does this really well.

Tim observed that if you can get people to use your application as a communication channel, you have reached the pinnacle of engagement. Reading Social was provided as an example of this.

User generated virtual goods that allow people to be raised up a celebrities within the community it can also drive deep loyalty and engagement.

New features that activated community – Mike said that gifting functionality allowed users to engage with each other in new ways. It created a user to user currency that allows the currency to thrive. Also, allow people to build up something over time. Leaderboards are another example of building things up over time. Give people the tools to add features, like quizes. Adding games into the application also enhances the user experience. Announcing today’s birthdays can drive birthday cake giving. Zach monitors this gift giving as his main metric of success.