Ways to Personalize Your Users' Expereicnes

Personalized content is changing the way information is delivered to each of us online. You may not even realize it’s happening, but implicit personalization is now driving content to you more and more often. Not sure what I mean? Well, let me try to explain what implicit personalization means. There are really two ways to personalize content, either explicitly or implicitly.

Explicit personalization is delivering personalized content based on information that the user provides. We’ve all been to sites that ask us who we are (login) and often asked us to set personal preferences (what’s your favorite sports team, what kind of news are you interested in or what city do you live in). Based on logging in and setting preferences, the site then contains logic that will present information to you depending on what preferences you have set. IN short, explicit personalization is set directly by the user specifically.

Implicit personalization is delivering personalized content based on how a user actual uses the site or their browsing history. In other words, no information has been explicitly provided by the user. The site is set up to track how the user travels through the content… what pages have they viewed, what kinds of information have they decided to view and spend time on, what actions have they taken on the site. Content is then crafted by the rules established behind the scenes to determine the best possible content for this individual user based on their previous usage.

This is a powerful technique for marketers. Users are putting themselves into specific audience segments simply by browsing the website. Marketers can then show appropriate content depending on those audience segments. Amazon was one of the pioneers of implicit personalization (“You may also like…”). With new content management system functionality, creating sites with implicit personalization is becoming easier and easier. You no longer need amazon’s budget to have this sort of functionality on your site.

Does Facebook really present any Marketing Value?

Social Media is currently a huge buzz in marketing circles and it seems that every marketing decision maker, regardless of their level of understanding or any insight into the value of the medium, has listed social media as a top priority of their current marketing plans. I think there is plenty of value in some social media tools, but I struggle to find the value in others, like Facebook.

In my opinion, for social media to be an effective marketing tool, a company needs to be part of a dialogue with its consumers. Social media users are not engaged simply for one way conversation, and this is where I think most companies go incredibly wrong. It's my opinion that marketing via social media is most effective when its reactive. In other words, the response from a company is more important to their brand than posting messages about the value of their product. And Facebook is primarily a tool that is driven by posting something about one's self or the product one is trying to sell.

Other tools, like twitter, allow marketers to see what people are saying about them, and react in a public way. I find this to be significantly more valuable to brand identity and loyalty than simply posting about how great a product is hoping the people will read it and comment about it.

Facebook is essentially narcissistic. And I don’t think that works for brands. Consumers want their problems solved. Hence I find a more reactive approach through social media to be a more effective approach to building consumer loyalty.