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.”
I don't care about who you are, but who you are right now. #sxsw #search #iHeartData
— Eman H. Aly (@EmanHAly) March 11, 2017
OH… and a related post: What about.com can teach us about millennials