October 20, 1997 Balance personalization and community for a successful store Two prominent bywords of Web commerce technology these days are personalization and community. In one sense, that's a relief. After two or three years of producing mostly static, brochure-ware Web sites, companies are finally starting to realize that their Web presences need to be more dynamic and interactive. And technology vendors are stepping into the gap with products that promise to make your Web site come alive, with pages customized to each visitor's preferences, interactive forums and chat features, and a host of other bells and whistles. (See chart below for some examples.) But before you rush to implement these technologies, consider the implications. You're going to have to decide which would best attract and retain your customers: highly personalized Web content, or a Web-based community. If you want to do both, you'll need to balance them carefully. Conflicting desires What defines a community? Generally, a community is built on shared interests, and depends on active, regular interaction between humans. (Interactions between humans and computers don't count as community -- at least until artificial intelligence gets a little smarter.) Community-building software can help you facilitate the communications process. But it's up to you to provide the ground from which shared interests can emerge. Savvy marketers hope that their customers will have a common interest in, and appreciation of, the company's products. If the company produces the right kind of product, and markets it successfully, the customers should have that interest. (I'm not going to join a laundry detergent club, no matter how much money Tide spends on advertising and marketing. But I might well take part in discussions about how to better use my word processor.) Assuming your customers have a shared interest in your product, or the problem that your product solves, you need to give them a place to interact -- for instance, your Web site -- and tools to enable them to communicate, such as forum software or real-time chat software. But here's the rub: If, at the same time, you're creating a personalized Web experience for each individual visitor, you may be fragmenting that community by eliminating a shared experience of your site. If each visitor sees his or her own, unique view of the content you offer, what does the "community" of visitors have in common except the URL of your home page? Personalization that works If you want to offer both personalization and customization, you need to consolidate your content into common areas of interest and allow these areas to form the basis of your community-building efforts. Then let visitors to customize the way they visit or look into these various communities. Don't let your personalization software fragment your site into tiny, unrelated pieces of information. While a high level of granularity in your customization tools may be appealing to a certain type of Web surfer, it will only disintegrate the content and the community that you're working so hard to assemble. Instead, break your content into sections, and let viewers customize which of those sections they view. Don't offer the opportunity for visitors to change the appearance of the sections themselves, or their contents. Of course, the best kind of personalization was, and still is, truly personal – in other words, an actual person is behind it, not just a computer program. But that's a topic for another day. Selected personalization and customization product vendors Proxicom http://www.proxicom.com Web-based forum iChat http://www.ichat.com Real-time chat Net Perceptions http://www.netperceptions.com Collaborative filtering Open Sesame http://www.opensesame.com Personalization tool BroadVision http://www.broadvision.com Personalization and one-to-one marketing Dylan Tweney is the editor of InfoWorld's Focus on I-Commerce section. He welcomes your comments at dylan@infoworld.com. Missed a column? Don't despair -- click here to catch up.