Segmenting Audiences for Social Media Engagement

To maximize an organization’s effectiveness in terms of marketing goal attainment, an overall audience (or “market” in the private sector) should always be segmented into groups of clients with common attributes (segments)  and then prioritized accordingly (target audience). Unfortunately, for most government organizations, a comprehensive market segmentation study is rarely a top priority. As a result, many public sector marketing initiatives are not optimized for maximum impact.

A quick note on social media governance

There are some general best practices and trends that I’m noticing are emerging in modern “social” organizations. Here are some governance recommendations based on these “best practices”:

• Social media strategy should fall under the portfolio of marketing , communications or equivalent
• Official social media engagement should fall under client services, customer service, or equivalent.
• Social media content should come from the various content experts in the organization
• Social media guidelines should be created by the “strategy” team and approved by HR and Legal
• Unofficial social media participation can come from anybody at any time. Nobody “owns” it. Need to follow guidelines, which are merely reminders as opposed to restrictions. Note: It is crucial that your organization positions them that way as well.

I’d be curious to hear thoughts from other consultants and/or practitioners. What are you noticing?

Identify search engine keywords used by your target audience in 60 seconds

This week’s “Learn in 60 Seconds” video is ready to go. The Lesson? How to identify search engine keywords used by your audience in 60 seconds. I personally think that Google Insights for Search is one of the most under appreciated free marketing research tools out there. I can’t teach you all that much in 60 seconds about this one, but hopefully enough to get all of you newbies interested. Stay tuned for another more “advanced” video about this tool down the road.