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With Web sites as key components of many (most?) businesses these days, Gerry McGovern, author of Killer Web Content, is on a mission to make them more effective by making them more "customer-centric." You'd think it would be a no-brainer that a business would want to do everything possible to attract customers, focus on what they want, make it easy for them to get it, and make their entire experience online as pleasant and positive as possible. Well.... You've been a customer.... What do you think most businesses focus on? Yup. Not you.

McGovern is convinced that five percent of any given Web site delivers 25 percent of its value. It's a concept he calls the "Long Neck," a play on author Chris Anderson's October 2004 Wired magazine article and book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. Anderson looked at Web-based business models such as Amazon.com and Netflix, which can offer a greater variety of products and more obscure items because they have aggregated what would otherwise be an audience too small to make them profitable.

McGovern maintains that the Long Neck problem is at the front end of the customer experience: that most Web site visitors only want to do a few very specific things while at an online site, but site owners don't know which is the effective and most critical five percent. Instead, businesses focus on themselves, touting components, products, and services their customers don't want or need—and then wonder why their Web sites don't deliver clicks and cash.

If you're serious about serving your online (or any) customers, which includes listening to what your customers want and how they go about finding it, visit Gerry McGovern's Web site, discover his Customer Carewords approach, and sign up for his weekly New Thinking email advice.

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