Wiley Content Management Bible, 2nd Edition 978-0-7645-7371-2 User Manual

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Part IV ✦ Designing a CMS

• Determine their attitudes, including their beliefs and opinions about the subjects

of your content. Describe how you will establish credibility with the audience,
what arguments will resonate with them, how to approach them effectively, and
how much personal data you can gather from them.

• Understand how they will compare your offerings to competitive publications.

Determine what publications (yours and others) the audience most commonly
reads. 

• Determine what you offer of value to them. Outline what benefits you offer and

what costs you extract. Describe how you communicate this value equation to
them and monitor it over time.

• Decide how they will use your information. Start by identifying their goals for

each of the publications you target to them; next, develop use case reviews, test
usability, and describe how you expect the audience to use each publication. 

• Figure out what sort of profile to create for them. A profile is a collection of traits

and trait values. Decide which traits you can use to categorize individuals and
place them in the correct audience. 

• Determine the localities that your audience encompasses. Localities take into

account the local culture as well as the capability of your organization to provide
content tailored to that locale. Include primary, constituent, and key localities in
your description.

• Determine the tasks that you must do on an ongoing basis to accommodate the

audiences that you identify. These tasks can range from periodic review of audi-
ence definitions to monitoring their activities via site logs. You might also review
competing publications and do periodic usability and use case reviews.

4. Relate your audiences to the other entities in your analysis. Be sure, above all, that by

serving them with the information they want you are able to advance your goals

After you’ve identified and described your audiences, you can use the traits to serve as the
user profiles on which you can build your personalization module.

At the same time as you want to serve your audience, you also want to get something from
them. The more that you know about people, the better you can anticipate their needs and
provide them with just the right content. On the other hand, the better you know people, the
more you can manipulate them into doing what you want them to. (Usually, you want them to
buy something.)

This paradox plays out on both sides of the computer screen. Users expect the Web sites that
they visit to be smart enough to anticipate their needs. They gravitate toward sites that seem
to know them and remember their preferences. On the other hand, users are wary or even
hostile toward sites that ask a lot of questions. The question immediately comes to mind:
“What are they going to do with this information?”

Direct marketers live by the creed of “Know thy audience.” They collect as much information
as possible on you and then carefully craft a message that they think you may respond to.
Direct marketers live and die by the lists of targeted audiences that they create. Marketers
walk that very thin line between serving their audiences and exploiting them. And, very inter-
estingly, the line isn’t a sharp one. Consider the same piece of junk mail sent to two neighbors.

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