Surfing The Net With Dory – The Absent-Minded Online Service
Personalization: “You wanna piece of me?”
Personalization in this context means the ability to get quick and easy access to the media – news, images, video, music, movies, whatever – that I care about, wherever I am. This is sometimes referred to a “media discovery,” and it’s what my company, matchmine, does.
Here again, solutions exist from the perspective of an individual site, media type or device, and some of them are very good. From the broad perspective of a user, though, it’s pure Dory.
Amazon.com, for example, knows what kind of books I like. I’ve essentially invested my time, effort and money with Amazon since 1996 to help them understand I like political non-fiction, the Italian Cooking Bible de minuit, and the occasional Sci-Fi epic.
But what if I want to grab some recommendations on LibraryThing.com, add iRead to my facebook profile, or even set up a rental relationship with Bookswim? The short answer is I’m SOL – despite being a loyal customer of Amazon for all these years, and the fact that none of those services does anything that interferes with the larger strategic interest of Amazon. The same is true of every category of media – movies, music, blog postings, online video, you name it. Within each of these media types (and even across some of them) there are decent solutions out there, but ALL of them operate within somebody else’s silo. The time I spend in one doesn’t help me in the others. The Web as a whole forgets what I like time and time again even within a single browsing session.
My preference data is mine, isn’t it? Shouldn’t I be able to take it with me, and share it with whomever I like?
Privacy: “Are… are you my conscience?”
Last, but not least, all of this stuff needs to be available in such a way that protects my privacy. This requirement probably slows progress in every other dimension of the problem, particularly for a provider taking an all-encompassing view across the other four issues.
Still, even if a single company could do it all, it’s not clear that it would be smart to let them. What we need instead is a collection of specialists in each of these areas, companies willing to serve users while protecting their interests, technologies that can help the Web remember without forgetting where their bread gets buttered.
Now that would be a friend indeed.
“Bye, Elmo!”
So what’s this all mean for marketers? Well there’s good news, and there’s bad news.
The good news is that intermediaries to solve these problems will surely emerge and that they will bring some exciting and unprecedented targeting capabilities with them. As long as we’re all willing to support some sensible Chinese walls between rich targeting data and anything considered personally identifiable by users – and no reputable brand I know isn’t – this goose will lay golden eggs for a long time to come.
The bad news is that a single less-than-reputable provider or marketer could still come in; brine, fry and sauce said goose with carrots and onions on the side. Assuming that doesn’t happen, the real challenge will be for marketers who are still trying to take advantage of GoogleClick cookies and behavioral targeting systems to learn what to do with the knowledge that a given male user lives someplace urban, knows lots of people, listens to hip-hop music and watches horror movies.
And once they tell you that, you better not forget it.
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