It’s that time of year for me where I spend a little time reviewing the past year in particular what has worked, what has proven popular on the blog and what have I learnt..

Why am I telling you all of this. Well, firstly I think it is important to review what we are doing to see what is working and what is not. Secondly, I want to show you how I do it as it as it may prove a useful thing for you to do too and, thirdly, to celebrate some of the content that has really worked out.

My Review

First up I look at the overall themes. To do this I first of took all of the headlines of all the posts and made a word cloud out of them. That way I would get a quick idea of the major themes that I have been writing about over the last year. Not that I don’t do that anyway but given that headlines are so important when it comes to search and attention I thought it would be a useful exercise. You can see the word cloud result below:

What it confirms is that the major themes were:

• Customer(s)
• Service
• Business
• Experience
• Leadership
• Marketing
• Interview
• Loyalty and
• Social

These themes were also confirmed by CustomerThink, where my posts get syndicated to. Over the course of this year, my posts have placed me as a Top 5 author over in the following 2 categories:

• Leadership: Customer-centric strategy, culture and organization alignment through effective measurements and rewards.
• Customer Loyalty: loyalty marketing, rewards programs, emotional vs. rational loyalty, advocacy and measurement approaches.

By the way, if you don’t know about CustomerThink, it is a global online community of business people striving to create profitable customer-centric enterprises. Each month, the site reaches 200,000 subscribers and visitors from 200 countries via email, RSS, LinkedIn and Twitter. CustomerThink currently serves over 80,000 visitors per month.

Next, I looked at the most popular posts in terms which received the most comments and was shared the greatest number of times on Twitter etc.

The popularity of my posts differ when I compare this blog and how my content performs at the CustomerThink site. This, I believe, has a lot to do with the different audiences. However, the most popular post across both sites was:

• What is a Chief Customer Officer: Interview with Vala Afshar of Enterasys

This was followed (on this site) by:

• What makes first direct so successful: Interview with their new CEO Mark Mullen

Out of the nearly 100 posts that I have written over the last year, here are a selection that also proved popular in terms of the number of comments that they received and how many times they were shared:

• Make it easy for your customers to give feedback or offer suggestions
• Giving your customers more choice is a good thing. Or is it?
• Is the customer always right OR you can only please some of the people all of the time?
• Asking for recommendations is great but not like this
• Creating a great place to work is the best business investment decision you could ever make – Interview with Henry Stewart
• Small business, customer loyalty…….there’s an app for that!
• Shackled by the skills crunch, a fish (business) rots from the head down
• Social Media has Revolutionized Customer Service Forever
• Is your marketing both interesting and interested?
• How Consumers Give Feedback
• Is simplicity at the heart of your customer experience?
• Social Objects for Marketing, Engagement & Change

What has this taught me?

• Interviews have been a great way to extend the reach and diversity of the blog, extend my thinking and allowing me to meet some truly wonderful and generous people. This is something that I’ll definitely be continuing in the New Year.
• Headlines are crucial when writing. There are quite a few posts that I have written that have not received the attention that I would have liked. I put a lot of that done to how much I thought about the headline or title of the post.
• What I think is interesting is not always the same as what you think is interesting and this exercise has given me some real insight into what you my readers are interested in.

Is there anything that I have missed or something that you’d like to see more of on the blog?