As we worked with Suresh Vittal of Forrester Research to put together the content, Jack, Suresh and I frequently hearkened back to a similar “sea change” that happened in the early days of content management.  In 1998, we spent much of our time talking to journalist, analysts and customers about unlocking the so-called webmaster bottleneck.  If you could only put web publishing in the hands of the internal content experts, then you could eliminate this delay created by having a “webmaster.”  By 1999 when we went public, everyone got it.

But unlocking this bottleneck created a new bottleneck - people finding the information they needed.  Now we suffered from content overload — because organizations kept producing more and more content and there was no efficient means to make sure that the content you showed was the content people needed or the products people wanted.  Organizations tried to fix it by investing in complex search engines or analytics or profile-based personalization.  None of this fixed the fundamental problem.

It’s time to get rid of the expert bottleneck.  In this economy, the timing is perfect.  There are some task that will always be manual but there are others that can and should be automated.   Automate for a better user experience.  Automate for efficiency. Turn what people see on your site over to the Mob.  It might make you feel a little uncomfortble now, but so was the idea of eliminating the webmaster bottleneck in 1999.  I say FUGETABOUTIT.

If you aren’t slightly disturbed yet, here is one more.

Think more about the context your users are currently in, and less about the identity of your users. If they are anything like me at all, trying to advertise to them based on some user profile created by a computer, “expert,” or their long history of purchases isn’t going to be as effective as discovering their current context. It also just might freak them out. Our identities, retina, and fingerprints are quite private and need to stay that way. Brian made a funny cartoon a few weeks ago describing an experience you might be able to relate to.

Yesterday, one of the conference attendees that visited our booth created a blog post explaining her take on targeting technologies, but on a personal level.

My favorite part of Baynote’s technology: it ignores demographics. Yes! When are people going to figure out that this is an individualistic age? Advertisers, you are wasting your dollars on serving me with endless weight-loss and dating ads. Not all 27-year old females are the same!

I’d have to agree with this point, not all 27 year old females are the same. Not simply because I’ve seen our technology benchmarked against demographic or profile based targeting technologies(which I have), but also because my 27-year old wife would have me sleeping on the couch if I said otherwise.

If you are a new reader, or would like more background on our contextual targeting approach, check out our whitepaper “In Search of The Human Element.”

This little doodle gives some insight into the inherent problems of using visitor profiles to target recommendations. We’ve all been at a site or two where the recommendations just don’t make much sense–what would happen in a real store using that same profile-based targeting system?

Survey Bias. I can see how location based recommendations would be extremely useful, but explicit recommendations introduces survey bias and the only people praising or condemning the products are the loud users. Studies often show that users that dislike or disapprove are more likely to rate a product then those enjoying the product.

Contextual Differences. Additionally, its often unclear what context the person is in when the recommendation is given. For example, I may rate a product poorly because its not what I was expecting. However, it could be great for someone with different expectations. In order to discover these expectations, we’d need to know what is the higher level intent of the user. Accurate recommendations must take into account the context of the user voting for the product. While Baynote is able to uncover a user’s context on a website, this information is difficult to extract offline.

I believe this dissatisfaction in travel is indicative of a bigger dissatisfaction with business, both big business and online business. People want the feeling they got when they walked into a mom and pop travel agency, clothing boutique or hardware store. We all want the owners to intimately know what’s on their shelves and which products our neighbors have found most useful. “Try this glue for wood and plastic”, “I suggest this hammer for your smaller hand.” But as business went online, they tried to substitute this intimacy with merchandizers and marketers. This just clogs the pipes between the sellers and the buyers. Stop trying to “merchandize” everything online. Let the shoppers stock the shelves. For travel, let fellow travelers show which resorts really are a great place for a “romantic vacation.”

You’ve heard me say it before… don’t rely on those folks who are willing to provide explicit feedback. You want to know what everyone thinks, not just those that might have an agenda behind their review or are just really peeved.

Today I had an enlightening conversation with one such vendor. He spoke highly of his merchandisers and explained their extensive knowledge of the business. He questioned the need of a recommendation engine when he had access to such experienced merchandisers. Point well taken. This continues to be a hurdle for many recommendation companies trying to break into the ecommerce industry. Lets move the conversation away from an “either or” scenario. Combining your experienced merchandisers with automated intent driven recommendations incorporates the knowledge of your business experts with the collective intelligence of your website visitors.

We’ve spent many resources on our merchandising console within our reporting interface Baynote Insights to facilitate this goal of “merchandising harmony.” For the last few months our clients have been combining our recommendations technology with their merchandising expertise to deliver an enhanced user experience while increasing conversion rates and average order values. Why substitute when you can combine?

During the Advanced Search Forum, when asked if there were any activities they were doing in 2008 that they intended to scale back in 2009, there was silence.  It seemed that everyone there was still doing anything they could to improve the customer experience and get the right message to the right person. I canvased several people privately and asked them if their high level goals were changing - few described any sort of retrenching, some said efficiency and automation were becoming more important.  The idea of putting the collective intelligence of site visitors to work, as Jack Jia has described it “let the mob run the store”, seemed to make sense to everyone.  It appealed to those trying to do more with less as well as those trying to bring the right social technologies to play on their sites.

Interestingly blogs themselves are still up for grabs regarding how and when and why they should be used.  Barbara Mousigian of CDW commented in the session on Customer Experience, that people were frequently distracted by blogs as the latest shiny object to add to their site.

I asked our CEO Jack what his biggest take-away was from eTail.  He said that businesses still haven’t figured how to create a connection with customers the way business could when mom & pop stores dominated.  They put so-called experts in charge…marketers and merchandizers in the world of eCommerce.  But this isn’t the same and the gap is still great.  Shopping on the web is still, in its essence, a lonely experience.  But what was cool at eTail, was people acknowledged the gap and were actively looking to fill it….not haphazardly with the latest shiny object but with the best practices and technologies already proving themselves in the marketplace.

Turned Off Users

The JupiterResearch document claims that email users’ likelihood to make an on-line or off-line purchase as a result of promotional emails has declined 7% over the last year. While an increase in popularity of other communication mediums such as text messaging and social networking certainly have an impact on these numbers, email marketing success is still within arms reach. The top reason for email users to unsubscribe continues to be a lack of relevance, followed closely by excessive emailing.

Here are a few tips to increase the success of your email marketing:

1. Test Different Layouts - A/B and Multivariate testing have been important methods used to determine the layout that will most likely lead to a conversion.
2. Tune into your users - The content of your email must relate to your users, quickly. Promote content that users will find most relevant, but not too frequently.
3. Foster Product and Content Discovery - Whether you are sending event-triggered emails like invoices or promotional emails like new product lines, provide popular or complimentary products that allow your users to discover new products and content that could lead a conversion.

For Information about how Baynote enhances email marketing, click here.

Let your website do the targeting

The instance a user lands on your website, they begin communicating with you. Its not always loud, but if you are listening this will become clear. They speak with their bounce rates, exit pages, entrance pages, site search terms, mouse movement, and many other web actions. This communication is not necessarily a function of generation, but one of context. By trying to focus on who your users are, which is expensive and typically inaccurate, you can lose focus on what really matters, their context. A user’s context drives their intent, and being tuned to that allows you to unlock the Collective Intelligence of your website. No marketing team or focus group with demographic data will be able to match the insight gathered from the collective intelligence on your website.

A Collective Intelligence Powered Site

So what does a site that is powered by its collective intelligence look like? This site will bring the right content to the right users as soon as they land on a website. Each page will recommend the content or products that will most likely result in a successful conversion. Search results will be tuned into the context of the search and reflect usage of the results by monitoring successes and failures of searchers. The Search Marketing strategy of the website will pivot around the keywords used by the users that are driven organically from Google and used in the site search. Landing pages will be dynamically created with the content or products found most useful by users and will update real time to reflect these shifts. eMail marketing campaigns driven by site observations will include clusters of products and content within the same context to increase engagement. Marketers will utilize reporting of the website’s collective intelligence to drive mutli-channel strategies including offline and mobile channels.

Automatic, not Autonomous

Harnessing the collective intelligence is not about creating an autonomous website. It aids marketers in providing a complete user experience that will create customer loyalty and bring users back to the site for future transactions. Solutions that harness the collective intelligence of your site must provide reporting and management interfaces that allow you to apply business rules and push promotional content or products. This mechanism allows you to maintain control of your site while using the collective intelligence to automate laborious and intensive data-driven tasks.

Discover Context, not Identity

Leveraging collective intelligence on the web is about understanding the context of your users through observing their interactions with your website, not their identity. By not requiring demographic information, the act of gathering your site’s collective intelligence is not perceived by your customers as an invasive practice. Therefore, this contextual approach is not only an effective and powerful targeting technique, but it keeps your brand intact by maintaining the trust of your users.