Drive your web development by responding to customer needs

A recent blog by Shane Atchison highlighted the issues in measuring social media.

One of the main things I'd like to highlight is right at the end.

The real challenges aren't technological, but operational. You have to define the right governance policies to manage customer engagement through social media, and you have to build the right workflow to prioritize responses, route information to the right people, and manage your content even as you release it into the wild.

I think this is the biggest and most important issue. When this isnt addressed it leads to a disjointed set of short term activities sometimes working against each other - the question is how do you join all the activities together in a way that makes sense?

For me they are joined together by the customer and their wants and needs. I find that if you can break down customers into a variety of key segments that revolve your activity around what they want and at what stage they are in their lifecycle with you then it becomes very easy to work out a series of practical approaches to dealing with these customers. You can then work out a marketing strategy for each segment and execute on it measuring the success of this activity.

You then measure the success of the activity you perform (site,ppc,twitter,facebook etc.) by asking

a) are you serving your customers needs in the best way possible
b) are you attracting enough volumes of the kind of customers you want

I find having segments to focus on can lead to a much better coordinated plan of attack, analysis and governance for you customers rather than flailing around with generic KPIs that most of the time are just telling you about how often content is being used.

Very few online analytics people focus on key customer segments however this for me is the best way fowards. Do yourself a favour and work out your key segments today, once they are in place most other things should fall into place.