Posts Tagged 'people'

I have found really informed article on folksonomies and taxonomies at FUMSI today here. The author comes down on the side of a blended approach as do we, and adds some useful insight into how this can fail.

I would also expand on the use of folksonomies for marketing insight, whether it is for SEO purposes, i.e. getting at the keywords/keyphrases that you haven’t considered – or getting further into the personas of your visitors/customers.

This is also an important consideration for intranets and extranets, where the author knows their content as the say the “Maintenance Manual v01.02″, and the users know it as “the blue book”.

I think that this is also, in the context of the online world, an example of the top down or bottom up approach challenge.

Once again a mixture of both is what you should aim for – of course whoever commissions the site has expert (read taxonomy) knowledge, that can at its worst manifest itself as a case of “I know best, not my customers” and may make things hard to find for the non-expert visitor.

Conversely taking the opposite viewpoint that starts from the “I know little about the product/service” can end up talking down to the visitor and may end up failing to deliver the site’s value.

The best sites cater for all visitors, understanding their differing personas and goals and delivering the best product/content for them.

I picked this up on Tech Republic and think it deserves a plug – Don’t sweat the small stuff too early its a recognition that sometimes the details slow down decision making and how it is easy to get distracted from the bigger picture, and your goals, by trying to get all the details tied up at too early a stage.

That’s not to say the details aren’t important, it’s just that there is a time and a place for everything.

A key skill for managers is to recognise when and where the details need to be addressed, and how to get the best out of a meeting. Setting a meeting’s agenda helps, as does an indication at the beginning of the meeting what decisions/outcomes the meeting should address will go a long way to achieving this.

Interesting to hear John Micklethwait the editor of the Economist on the BBC Today programme this morning talking about his readership.

He says that rather than thinking about them in terms of Income, Intelligence, etc. they have started thinking in a more psychometric way and asking “how curious they are”, and whether they would be interested in Australia. This opens up a whole new way of thinking about audiences.

Part of what we do is consider personas, and by adding these aspects into the mix you could end up asking better, more informative questions like; how connected are they; do they evangelise; will they scan or dig through my content?

This leads on to better ways of communicating and engaging as well and raises the question as to whether one should consider using NLP techniques when writing copy. Ensuring that there are trigger words aimed at eliciting responses in the different types of personality.