The Personalization Paradox: How Standardized Content Creates Personalized Experiences

Overview

This presentation was given by Val Swisher of Content Rules, Inc.

Her presentation focused on the idea that most companies now are looking to make the content of their websites personalized, but that they don't know the right way to do it. She said that personalized experiences deliver the right content, to the right person, at the right time, on the right device, in the language of their choice. Her personalization paradox, then, is that in order to personalize something, you need to standardize it. It sounds counter intuitive, but the way she explained it really made sense.

Key takeaways

When talking about standardization in content, Val had 5 Dimensions she talked about. They were:

*Output types *Components *Paragraphs *Sentences *Words Then she went on to define each of her dimensions.

*The output type determines the category of content you are delivering *The component is an independent unit of content that can be combined with other components to deliver an experience *The paragraph is where you define the tone and voice of your company In the sentences is where grammar and style rules govern how words are combined *Words (terminology) is standardized so every piece of content you create uses the same terms to mean the same thing

Her final piece of advice, which was the most important message from her presentation, was that you must standardize everything about the content. It's the easiest, and most cost-effective, way to personalize content.

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Reflection

I'm continuing to have trouble switching my brain to "computer language" from "spoken/written language".In Val's presentation, when she mentions that one of the ways we can personalize websites is by giving the client the information in the "language" of their choice, I'm still thinking about spoken language, not computer language. Remember all the trouble I had at the beginning of the semester with the Clark article, and understanding how content can be stored separately from styles? Well, that's finally making more sense to me now. Val's presentation helped with that understanding. If we want to personalize things for a client, it is much more cost effective for us if we have our content standardized, and the only way we can do that is if we store content and styles separately.