Delivering Personalizing Content: Collecting Traits

Without some notion of who a person is, personalizing for that person isn’t possible. Who the people are that use your publications is the subject of your audience analysis. Some organizations personalize on an individual basis, bypassing audience segments all together. I believe that this approach doesn’t deliver nearly the value to the organization as personalizing by audience segments.

By using your audience analysis, you can come up with the set of traits and trait values that each audience type may exhibit. Each cluster of these traits is a user profile that you can collect, store, and access to decide what kind of person you’re dealing with.

Determining a user profile is one thing. Collecting trait values for each person who uses your publications is quite another. In pursuit of an audience trait, you really have only the following choices:

Filed under: Content Management : Metadata