Personalization News & Articles

Every click and every second counts. So optimize your marketing campaigns by focusing on delivering relevant, personally meaningful messages.

There is a lot of buzz going on around personalization in the online world -- how to use it, does it matter, won't the visitor be suspicious, etc. From where I stand, personalization matters. Here's why.

One of the final sessions from last week's Gilbane conference (see our coverage here) in San Francisco focused on Personas, Market Segmentation and User Experience design. Strong assertions were made (e.g., "data without segmentation is crap") and key lessons shared. Here are the highlights and take-aways.

Web Engagement Management (WEM) seems to be one of the prevalent themes at this year’s Gilbane Conference San Francisco. The last session of the event was around the convergence of online marketing tools and web content management systems. CMS has been redefined as a Conversation Management System.

Some say WEM's the latest WCM marketing ploy. Some have never heard the phrase. We think Web Engagement Management (WEM) is an important change in the way people build and utilize web content management systems.

In the world of search and discovery, there aren’t many viable examples that give users the information they didn’t know. For every Pandora, Netflix and Amazon, there is a Google and Facebook. But Worio (news, site) has other plans.

Continuing to build up on the bright developments that we saw in CQ 5.1 and 5.2, Day Software (news, site) released the newest version of their Communiqué Web CMS/DAM/Social Collaboration product.

Day’s CTO David Nüscheler and CMO Kevin Cochrane gave us a tour of the top new features in CQ 5.3.

FatWire (news, site) is the most recent company to join the circle of bad economy repercussion evaders (BERE?).

The Web Experience Management Provider reported a 50% Increase in License Bookings in Q3, 2009, along with fourteen new customers including Amadeus, Bank of Western Australia, and Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The secret so their success? Let's take a look:

EPiServer (news, site), on its ongoing quest in "the new era of the Engaged Web," has news for marketers, who are looking to deliver dynamic, personalized, optimized and measurable web experiences.

EPiServer Marketing Arena is a new product designed to do just that, and then some.

FatWire (news, site) is back in the news. These folks have been busy lately. In between "rescue" plans and moves towards worldwide "domination," the web content management vendor also had some time to work on two new releases -- Engage 7.5 (content targeting) and Analytics 2.5 (content optimization) -- which bring major architectural changes involving open source-based technology.

Marketers have always been concerned about delivering personalized content to the right audience. And here is yet another development of a content management solution that aims to solve that problem.

This time it comes from Autonomy Interwoven (news, site ) coupled with their concept of Meaning Based Marketing (MBM).

Web content management provider Interwoven has released some new personalization and profiling features for its LiveSite product, enabling marketers to deliver a richer visitor experience.

Interwoven LiveSite now includes the ability to target specific visitor segments, whether they are anonymous site visitors or known customers.

Percussion Software has been in the news lately with their latest technology offering, Personalization Solution which sits on top of their Rhythmyx CMS providing personalized messaging.

Since then we’ve heard there have been some management changes that should help the company expand its presence in the WCM market for Personalization, Web Analytics and Community Marketing.

Once upon a time personalization was a magic and wonderful word. The promises came and went, largely unfulfilled. That’s not to say that the technology didn’t work. It did. Nor is it to say that the basic ideas were bad. They weren’t. The problems by and large were related to how people attempted to use the stuff and the complexities and costs related to integrating it.

Amazon and others have continued to pursue the grail, if in modest strokes. Now were seeing web content management vendors investing in this direction. I say “grand!” If it’s done simply and with out too much ambition, personalization can be a great tool.

There was a time when customization was all the rage. It wasn’t enough to just get your message out, you had to try to tap into what made the user tick and figure out what they’d do next based on what they just did. It turned out that too much personalization was a little creepy. After all, not all of us are that calculated as to know what our next move is, never mind the next book we’ll read or song we’ll download.

Leave us alone, the user cried.

But with the advent of the Semantic Web upon us, we are promised great fortune and fame, or at least the prospect of knowing that when I say “I’m fine”, it really means that I want you to ask me more about my day. And the Semantic Web will ask, because it’s determined to be everything the current Web isn’t.

Vignette understands that the pull of Web 3.0 is getting stronger. So they are taking another stab at personalization and have announced three new product releases, aimed at delivering more personal and engaging Web experiences to an organization’s key audiences.