Web Content 2007: The Relevance of Relevancy

By Marisa Peacock | Jun 22. 2007

Tags: conference, fatwire, kamal kapur, relevance, web content

We're at the end of the Web Content conference path. At the end of the long trip we find Kamal Kapur, Director of Product Development for FatWire Software.

At the risk of obsolescence, your website must cater to the individual. Remaining relevant is crucial to an online experience. What is relevancy? Kapur describes relevancy as factors that affect the outcome of a user engagement, such as accuracy, ease, correlation of user path.

To become relevant you need to -- say it with me -- know what your user wants.

And how do you do that? - by knowing their behavior. Which begs the question, how do you gather information without prying or alienating the consumer? Here are a couple of methods:

Explicit personalization is a rules-driven strategy based on known or clearly-stated visitor attributes. It can be dictated by a visitor's declared interest, but bad because it usually requires the user to register.

Implicit personalization, or a visitor's behavior on a website that suggests what they are likely interested in, usually doesn't require registration and allows visitors to dynamically "self-profile" according to their behavior on the site. Implicit personalization "listens" to the visitor. It recognizes and responds appropriately to expressed interests and desires.

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Most sites offer static content to every individual user. Relevancy relies on websites to offer content that is, instead, unique to each user. The pride consumers feel when being recognized, whether by a long lost friend or by a website, is an essential element of human behavior.

Those in the audience questioned the relevance of relevancy, suggesting that good navigation and good content with good user options is all that should be needed. After all, not everyone can be Amazon.

Kapur disagrees, emphasizing that unless you know what engages and inspires users, they will be left to find what they seek elsewhere. Once companies formulate a relevance strategy, they need to start immediately on a small scale and make progress quickly.

Then measure their results and optimize the experience accordingly. In the end, the process will turn companies into champions that bear the standard of relevancy old-school knights in armor.

Catch up on all our Web Content adventures here: