Engage thy enemy

Another word for my (overused/annoying) marketing word of the week - engagement.

I was doing the blog browsing rounds recently and thought it quite amazing how many members of the Digerati are labelling themselves as experts in engagement. I mean... how can someone or something become an expert in engagement? Engagement involves both the party doing the engaging and the party being engaged, therefore to be an expert is somewhat undefinable as engagement is such an individual notion. It's like people who think themselves fluent in online conversation... how can they? Why can they? Your appreciation of conversational elements will be different from mine and vice versa. Anyway I then thought that collective engagement via social media could actually be ironic and that engagement must be something that is user led between two parties; something organic...

To finish, I would like to make mention that the word engagement can also mean something that involves a hostile encounter - something which I don't think is too far off at the rate and method that some companies are trying to dabble in social media.