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What
personalization is, through examples.
Example:
Reflect.com starts with an expert system.
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Interrogates
you to make decisions building a recipe.
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Asks
you to name the product, choose a package.
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Talks
to you, person to person
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Remembers
what you created last time.
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Lets
you choose a graphic look for the site.
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Offers
related services or products.
Another
example: LandsEnd.com
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Puts
you onstage, in their clothes.
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Lets
you get measured, or enter measurements online.
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Lets
you put together your own model from spare parts.
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Asks
embarrassing personal questions.
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Shows
what you might look like in their clothes.
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Lets
you try on all the pieces of an outfit at once.
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Lets
you save several outfits for your next visit.
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Reminds
you what
went into an
outfit you saved earlier.
Personalization
starts with a profile.
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You
register, or you give some information.
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On
return, you're identified by a cookie, or your login.
Personalization
lets you organize content your way.
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Pick
a content model.
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Add
or remove content to your own page.
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Move
content around.
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Arrange
the layout
with your
new content.
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Pick
and choose from standard content.
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Each
object is a distinct element, so we can allow the user to reshuffle
the content model.
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Users
set up
their own model for a particular type of content.
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Users
get to elevate the elements they use most often.
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Users
get to iconize
content they rarely need.
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To
let users choose, we display the
full content model for each type of content, such as a procedure and
let users pick which elements they want included, excluded.
Personalization
brings relevant content to your attention.
-
Content-matching
surfaces some related material you may not have known about.
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Suggested
content helps you avoid browsing and searching--making the site easier
to use, saving time.
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Niche
content focuses on topics each group might be interested in.
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From
login profile we pick the right content model for each group.
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If
you are a beginner we give you hand-holding.
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Local
translations pop up, based on profile language choice.
Personalization
remembers what you said and did.
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No
more retyping your address, identifying products you own, specifying
your interest.
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Give
people control over every piece of information in their profile.
Invite editing, updating, greater accuracy.
Personalization
brings relevant news.
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Email
tailored just for you...is not spam.
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It
brings info I might not get, because I do not visit the site very
often.
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People
act on these emails, re-subscribe.
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They
want product news, solutions, trouble-shooting, gossip.
Personalization
means you get a personal response.
Personalization
extends customization.
-
Customizing
means that the site or the user makes choices among various chunks of
content aimed at the user's particular niche.
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Personalizing
recognizes the actual situation of the individual receiving the
information.
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Personalizing
may also reveal information about the writer, as an individual.
Pluses
and Minuses
Benefits
to the organization
1.
Personalization makes the site easier to use, saves customers time.
2.
Personalization increases consumer loyalty, brings return visits,
leads to repeat business, reduces costs per sale.
3.
The user's participation in the personalization process creates a
reason not to switch sites.
4.
Over time, the process builds a relationship, reducing the
consumer's tendency to get angry, suspicious, or indifferent.
5.
Personalized content is more relevant, easier to understand, think about,
remember. People get it.
Downside,
for organization
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Cost
of converting to structured content.
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Cost
and time involved in integrating databases.
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Cost
of installing content management system.
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Cost
of integrating content management with customer relationship
management software.
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Cost
of data mining old transactional data.
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Difficulty
of restructuring the organization around the customer, not the
product.
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Difficulty
of creating a new workflow for content from all over the organization.
How
to personalize content
1.
Create a unified profile.
2.
Use rules and inferences to bring individuals together with content.
3.
Build informative objects for assembly on the fly.
1.
Create a unified profile.
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Ask
for key information.
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Reward
their effort immediately.
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Pull
up records of previous interactions with the individual.
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Ask
more questions from time to time, with popup windows, surveys,
sweepstakes, special offers that require answering just one more
question.
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Put
a user in charge of his or her own profile.
2.
Use rules or inferences to bring individuals together with content.
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All
information in the profile must be tagged, passed to content
management, for immediate action.
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Rules
identify niche audiences, recommend specific content, build pages on
the fly.
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Make
inferences from choices, behaviors.
3.
Build informative objects for assembly on the fly.
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An
object is a class, such as Procedure.
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When
we write a particular procedure we are creating an instance of the
class.
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Each
instance of that object follows the same internal pattern.
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Objects
can be nested within other objects.
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Each
class of object answers a type of user question.
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An
object can send and receive messages with other objects (links).
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The
same object can be reused in many different locations.
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An
object may have many attributes.
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We
use the values in the attribute fields to pick content, search.
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Objects
can be put together on the fly, to create personalized content.
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XML
means self-describing elements--objects to store in an OO database,
manipulate with software.
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Content
management handles personalized assembly of content.
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Create
document models (DTDs) for each small group within your audience.
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Create
XSLT stylesheets to transform content on the fly.
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Allow
consumer choices to determine the content model and stylesheet for an
individual, following rules, inferences.
The
15-step process for creating content for one person at a time.
1.
Launch a core group to lead development.
2.
Develop models of
all content.
Drill down to the smallest element you or a user might want to
access by name, act, or type.
3.
Diagram the structure of each complex object.
4.
Create a DTD for each type of content.
5.
Create a layout for each type of content as it will appear to each niche.
6.
Create a stylesheet for each type of content, medium, and niche.
7.
Develop search forms to find objects by attribute values.
8.
Define the workflow as your team moves content onto the Web.
9.
Work out how to collect live data from databases, such as customer
relationship management, transaction history.
10.
Buy, adapt, or get access to existing authoring tools, content management
software, or an object-oriented database to control the publication of
objects.
11.
Create guidelines and train writers, artists, and editors.
12.
Use user and task analysis to identify and describe each niche.
13.
Think of new ways to personalize, multiplying perspectives for one
individual.
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What
decisions does this kind of person need to make?
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What
questions does this kind of person have, indicated by searches,
customer support queries?
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What
values can you discover in this niche?
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Attitudes?
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Trends?
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What
kind of content might be most relevant to this kind of person's job,
tasks, culture, personal career?
14.
Build new attributes into existing elements, to finetune delivery,
searching.
15.
Respond to email personally.
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Start
off with phrases from the other person's email.
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Put
the generic answer in the middle.
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End
with a personal note.
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Sign
your name!
Problems,
challenges, and screwups.
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Not
enough people to write all this.
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Unfinished,
shaky, immature software.
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Conversion
difficult.
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Baffling
registration, profile process.
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No
follow through.
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Make-believe
personalization.
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Content
left unstructured.
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Business
not aligned with consumers.
What
about privacy, trust, and honesty?
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Be
straight about the rewards of registering, filling in the profile,
answering your questions.
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Use
double opt-in for your own e-mail newsletters.
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Write
the privacy statement in English, put it on every page, and, oh yea,
follow it.
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Don't
throw their personal info in their faces like junk mail sweepstakes.
"All the folks at 918 La Senda..."
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The
point of personalization is developing a relationship with an
individual, through conversation.
Personalization
changes our idea of audience.
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The
audience is not a homogenous mass.
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The
individual we are talking to is a peer.
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The
individual is active, not passive.
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The
individual contributes to the content, arranges it, asks questions,
suggests topics, looks for a response from us.
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The
individual has emotions, attitudes, characteristics based on situation
(age, class, neighborhood, job)--and so do we. But the individual
breaks out of the market segment.
Personalization
changes our idea of what we do.
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We
alternate between being speaker and listener.
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We
are carrying on a conversation.
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We
are building a (very) small community.
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We
are struggling to get beyond our original groups, stereotypes, roles.
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We
are each discovering how much we can
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reveal
about ourselves.
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We
are writing persona to persona.
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We
must cut through anonymity.
We
are joining the
conversation, one writer at a time, one visitor at a time.
Join
the discussion by posting at
PersonalizingContent
@yahoogroups.com
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