Smart phones’ smaller screens and a glut of news and information makes it more essential for users to personalize content so that preferred stories can be seen, noted DailyMe COO Neil Budde, who was speaking at ILM:09 in Los Angeles last week. “The devices keep getting smaller and smaller,” he said. “If you have an iPhone, it becomes more difficult because you are scrolling through irrelevant content.
Budde also says that personalized solutions such as Dailyme provide compelling analytics that are missing from solutions such as Omniture or Google. They look at individual page views, while “we are looking at content within the site across multiple stories. We can provide demographics of people and what they are reading about, and zero in on your most valuable users: your loyalists.” DailyMe is currently being used by Boston.com and other publishers.
Speaking on the same session, PegasusNews Founder Mike Orren says his site is expanding beyond its Dallas flagship and will soon be rolled out with affiliate partners, generally affiliated with Gap Broadcasting, which bought the company last year from Fisher Broadcasting.
Orren said the biggest lesson that Pegasus has learned over its three year existence is “not to customize everything. Some niches you can’t customize,” he says. The most successful personalization is when customers don’t know they are using it. “They just thought that our tastes were the same as theirs.”
It is also essential that sites track what readers are looking at and adjust accordingly, rather than rely on checklists that users fill out once and never update. “People don’t see themselves accurately in their interests,” said Orren. “You get false positives. They say they like opera and champagne and then they go to a honky tonk and drink beer.”