The Personalization Podcast

Personalization is about building great experiences, and there is no better way to understand what experiences matter than by talking with real people. User Experience Research is a field that allows us to understand our users in a systematic and meaningful way, inspiring us to make better experiences.

Will your website's personalization algorithms be taking over the world? Not any time soon according to Katherine Bailey, our guest on this week's show. We cover the underpinnings of machine learning and how it applies to personalization, and talk about a few recent blunders in the field.

Building Customer Experience has many challenges. Content Strategy, measurement of business goals and personalizations. I sit down in this episode with Melanie Poitras, a friend and colleague who works with Acquia's customers to help define and plan their customer experience strategy, often leading up to implementing Personalization.

"What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -- Juliet

Does it matter what we call "Personalization"? I think it does, and the industry is struggling. Today I heard a new proposal, "Personification", which would be used to address some level of privacy concerns. What we need is a Taxonomy for Personalization, and it turns out I'm not the first person to think that. So that's what this episode is all about.

If Content is King, then Context is Queen. Personalization is all about matching the right content or messaging to the right person, and doing that means you need to know something about who that person is. In fact, the more you know, the more likely you are to be successful.

That's not to say that all context is created equal though. Depending on your organization and your audience, different pieces of information may be critical or close to meaningless. As a simple example, a retailer may be heavily effected by a customer's local weather. Cold and rainy, you may need a rain coat. Warm and Sunny? Time for the beach!

Today's episode is all about cataloging the kinds of things that we can know about the consumers of our digital experiences. The list is quite broad and it will range from the fairly straight forward and obvious, into perhaps surprising and sometimes creepy.

"As a Marketer, I want to Personalize my site, so that I can better engage with my audience." That's an example of how I might write an Agile Story about Personalization. In this episode we discuss the usefulness of stories in the Agile process and also explore their direct relevance to helping us think about the right way to personalize by focussing on the "who" and the "why" of what we're doing.

In part 2 of this Interview, John and I discuss personalization vendors and how to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of a personalization program. John gives advice on picking the right software and breaks down some categories to help understand the space a little better.

Today we're joined by Author and CEO John Berndt, the author of Personalization Mechanics and a speaker and thought leader in what it takes to be successful with Personalization.

Among other things, we discuss in this episode John's motivation for writing the book, what it takes to be successful with Personalization, who needs to be involved, what organizations should and shouldn't be thinking about Personalization, and discuss some of the technology as well.

An Interview with Kyle Polich of the Data Skeptics Podcast. We discuss being skeptical of and with data as it relates to personalization, A/B testing and web analytics.

Doing personalization well is all about iterating quickly, and that's what this episode is about. We'll be borrowing a lot of ideas from the software development space, but FEAR NOT! There's no deep, technical stuff coming your way. These are straight forward, down to earth principles that you can take and apply to almost any area of your life or business that needs to be more efficient.