Effective customer engagement is definitely the key to gaining a big market share when it comes to online retail. I like the part where you say, "Online and offline becomes invisible ..". 

Loved this article, and it's not because we are building a product to aid just this type of real time engagement. I believe a true indicator of engagement is the number of people reaching out to your brand and speaking to your brand. If this number is high, that means you as a customer experience executive have managed to successfully present your brand as a human. A major leap when you consider that social networks are primarily for personal interactions. 

The shelf life of information on social networks is very small; may be minutes. In such a short time a brand needs to create and nurture the personal connect, rather than use social networks as just another hoarding to paste your advertisement. 

We, a small team based out of India, are trying to build a product that addresses this problem of conversation management in real time across all contemporary channels on the web. This includes social networks and Email. Our strongest focus is a controlled automation engine that enables engagement execs to deal with customer conversations with scale. Please do check us out: http://muhive.com