R: [thelist] Web Marketing

[Watkins Matthew]

Sorry about the empty post. Too much coffee...

> Whadda ya think of the concept?

Martin is right, Vignette / Broadvision to a T. The concept is the basis for
one to one marketing. Customise your content based on a set of implicit
and/or explicit business rules. Also once you have gathered enough
information you can start profiling your customers, elaborating the huge
amount of data (data mining)to figure out which clusters of content tend to
be viewed together, which clusters of content tend to lead to transactions
or evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives.

Its a big promise. I guess that's why they cost so much. 

Cheers,

Matthew





Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Sounds like a vanilla Vignette or Broadvision demo - pretty reasonable
implicit personalisation. Of course to make sense in a demo, it has to be
non-subtle.


What you'll tend to do is set a number of key events, and
a ruleset which will influence along a number of vectors depending on which
of those events have been triggered by a given user.

The fun bit starts when you start defining what data you collect and how the
variables influence the end content. It's a *non* fun game, which really
needs a hard-core data analyst at your elbow.

The hardest bit is working out what combination of events really help you
understand the characteristics of your users. In some cases, you end up just
asking the user anyway, so you're not guessing as much.

Martin