Context: The key to personalization

Everytime we come to the Internet for help, we’re a different person.

Dr. Jon Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer at About.com, presented observations from 20 years of user behavior and interaction with over 35 Million posts. I wrote about that presentation in an earlier post.

It’s your context… what’s going on in the world right now… that is more reflective of what you need, than the last 6 months of your browsing history. 

To illustrate the point, Roberts identified the most predictive interests of men as being self-directed. While a woman’s tends to be directed at those she cares for. So, if traditional web personalization were to create a persona based on her searches, they would identify a middle aged woman concerned with orthodontics, alzheimer’s, and prostate cancer.

I don’t care who you were… I care who you are right now…

Roberts says we can make reasonable predictions based on context, in addition to past behavior. We can find context in a number of data points:

  • Time of day
  • Device type
  • Network type
  • Current events

Roberts says:

“It is enormously arrogant to think we know why you came to a site based on what you’ve done over the past 6 months, rather than looking at what is going on in the world right now.”

 

https://twitter.com/EmanHAly/status/840597043349508096

 

 

OH… and a related post: What about.com can teach us about millennials