A friend loves to cook. And he loves chicken. He loves to surf the Net too. That, he says, is quite a desirable mix. Earlier, he had to Google for ‘Chicken+recipe+Indian...’ These days, he types ‘chicken’ in the search bar and page-after-page of desi ways to prepare the bird opens up for him.
Well, this is how personalized search and Google’s location database software works, much to the friend’s delight.
As the world becomes a global village, thanks to the World Wide Web and resultant interconnectivity, demand for greater access to content and services over a variety of platforms and devices has been increasingly growing. Consequently, the need to provide rich, intelligent and personalized services to the user, irrespective of his location or the method of access available to him, is also on the rise. Further, with the need for information round-theclock, the need to be connected and have access to resources and services at all times have also grown proportionally.
It is imperative that these requirements are fulfilled in a seamless manner.
This customization or personalization of the social media for my friend demonstrates the ability of big corporations like search engine Google to harness data like never before. Earlier, this data or Big Data -- the IT word for 2012 -- exceeded the processing capacity of hitherto known database systems. Big data was until recently considered either too big or too fast to be of any use. For, in spite of a mine of patterns and information, it was unviable for ‘farming’ because of high costs and management impediments.
Not anymore. With the advent of commodity hardware, cloud architectures and open source software, it has become possible for even the small and medium enterprises to ‘tame’ big data.
Edd Dumbill, writer, programmer, entrepreneur and free software advocate, enumerates the opportunity in the Big Data boom: “Big data analytics can reveal insights hidden previously by data too costly to process. Being able to process every item of data in reasonable time removes the troublesome need for sampling.”
By this very fact, personalized social media has taken over marketing too. In other words, everything that you like is made available niche to you. How? You can set YouTube as your homepage with your own choice of video content. Likewise, the Yahoo homepage can be personalized with an array of elements for the user to see when he arrives at the site.
Personalized marketing, therefore, is an extreme form of niche marketing where a product is not designed to appeal to many, a group or a whole population, but only to a specific customer -- you. Some forms of personalized marketing will appear to a slightly wider audience than just one person, but the market segment is still very small. And the phenomenon is getting closer home. In July, online travel portal MakeMyTrip launched mobile apps for smartphones and iPhones for users to search and book flights on mobile. Passenger details can be stored on the device to avoid typing details every time for further bookings, even as the app provides travel solutions, exclusive travel deals and instant personalized deal notifications. According to Chris Lowther of Pitney Bowes Software, the customer relationship management (CRM) specialists, using big data to provide a highly personalized customer experience is crucial to ensure customer loyalty in the current strained economic climate.
Back in 2010, Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO, said in an interview with Arianna Huffington: “People don’t want something targeted to the whole world—they want something that reflects what they want to see and know.” Indeed, that is so true for content too. People have begun demanding relevant content that interests or motivates them. And, owing to such demands, the providers are personalizing content. Trinity Mirror, publishers of the Daily and Sunday Mirror, found that personalization was the ideal way out of the “big problem” of “surfacing” hundreds of articles published in a day. They turned off personalization for people who were getting it before, and found that personalization means people spending a longer time on the site.
So is personalized media being greatly used in the Indian media industry? It is evident that content services on the web and on devices will cater to us, as per relevance and our needs. However, personalization is yet to get to a stage where the content supplied is right and at the right time. Considering that media personalization is based on intelligent use of collaborative and personal usage and consumption data, which in turn combines with context (location, device, time of day, day of week) and descriptive meta data, the results have shown a never-ending opportunity.
Lance A. Strate, an American Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in the US, writes in his blog, Time Passing: “Industrial technology gave us mass production, one size fits all, replacing the handicrafts of organic, traditional life in the village and tribe, where everything produced, while formulaic, is tailor-made, and no two items are identical. Electric technology opens up the possibility of feedback and technology that can be individualized, but personalization is a better map for that territory. It’s not the handicraft of days gone by, but a shift away from mass society and mass conformity into a have-it-your-way approach and networked identities.”
Feedback: abatra@exchange4media.com
