A few weeks ago I went to a talk given by Karen McGrane called Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content. In it Karen laid out a compelling argument for structured content adapted to targeted publishing channels, and for decoupling organizations’ content management systems from their websites. The wisdom of this was clear: it has [...]
Data. You sure hear a lot about it these days. Reading the tech press, you’ll find one story after another concerning “big data”. Organizations hire specialists to manage user analytics, and much is made of the value of collecting user data. In fact, the entire value proposition of the recently announced Facebook IPO is based [...]
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Personalization is the act of responding to the user, of tailoring the experience to meet their specific context. In order to make it work, one needs to gain insight into that user, to gain an understanding their intent and from that determine the most appropriate response.
Triggers and Responses
The basic mechanic of personalization is [...]
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Previously I spoke about the growing demand for authenticity from organizations. That post discussed how humans are optimized to seek out communications with other humans, and that strong negative emotions are evoked when they are forced to deal with impersonal organizations attempting to manage communications through naively [...]
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It’s no secret that industries that have traditionally been involved with the sale of content are in turmoil. In a wave that started with the well-documented upheavals of the music industry at the beginning of the last decade, every content industry has been turned upside down, one after the next.
There are two powerful forces [...]
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Once upon a time there was only one job in the “web business”: HTML jockey. When the initial wave of Internet commercialization happened, companies scrambled as best they could to get their “home pages” up. That was both the beginning and end of activity on the Internet at that time: other than the fundamental importance of [...]
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Faceless Rage: n. The feeling of overwhelming anger felt by individuals when their need for an authentic human interaction is frustrated by a faceless organization.
People are thrilled by excellent customer service but driven into a rage when forced to deal with a faceless corporation. So what’s going on here, below the surface? Is [...]
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Does personalization make your skin crawl? Even if you’re fine with it, odds are good that you know someone who hates shopping on Amazon, or refuses to participate in Facebook, because they feel creeped out by the personalized content and behavior on these sites. What is it that’s at the heart of this feeling of [...]
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