The current context of the user: great opportunity for incremental business
In the soon to be forgotten “Pre-Internet Phase” of desktop computing developers leveraged the context of the user inside their applications:
- right click menus offer functionality depending on the context of the application,
- context sensitive help is trying to provide background information to what the application sees as the current context of the user
But now there is the Internet and the opportunity that is offered by a good understanding of the current context of the user is bigger then providing only context driven functionality and help. It is very well understood by the major websites and services that the current context of the user can also be leveraged to reach for what matters most to successful companies: to make more money.
Business case “selling”:
Amazon is a good example. With different methods and at various stages of the Amazon shopping experience a lot of what Amazon knows about all users is leveraged to let the user look at items that are maybe also of interest for him (Look at the “What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?“ feature of Amazon.com; this is by the way not yet existing on Amazon.de).
Another good example is Apple. Apple just also increased their efforts to leverage the current context of a user. Apple is in a very “lucky” position because first of all the “goods” bought from iTunes are digital music/video files (versus Books/DVDs/CDs etc from Amazon) and second also the management of the files on the users PC is done with Apples own desktop application: That opens the full context of the users music library to generate additional turnover. Full context means here: what songs in what quality and with what “data about data” for each song. If you are looking from this perspective at the newly introduced “Complete My Album” feature www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/03/29itunes.html you get probably a deeper understanding of the value of the business model behind iTunes.
Business case “advertising”:
If you want to get a first class experience of targeted advertising I can give you one advice: Sign up for a Google Mail account (mail.google.com) and after a few days you will realize that the Google engine is looking very deeply into your mails mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en&answer=39382 . It looks at the subject, the address from whom you received stuff and obviously also at the body of the mail. So if you are receiving a mail from the Business Intelligence provider Cognos, Google will not hesitate to show you advertisements about BI and Data Warehousing Consultants and so on. You may say “Yeah, but what is so special about it?” and you are right, we all know Google search and the ads there for several years. So I should not be surprised that Google is taking the content of mails and treats it in the same way as the content of my search. But I can tell you: I was surprised.
A few years ago I would have hated the idea of ads in my mail system. Googles fantastic ability to execute is to me proven again: I just do not care and take those ads as additional, sometimes even helpful provided contextual information.
Bottom line: Google is using the whole context of the mails of the users to display advertisements. And as their figures have just recently shown: their business is doing well.
If your business in whatever form is leveraging the Internet to get in touch with your customers the million-dollar question after reading this article should be: What of the current context of my customer can I leverage in a seamless way to increase my business with this customer right now?
But there is more to this (and by the way this is the causa finalis why line-of-reasoning is existing): Ask yourself, is mailing and shopping (and obviously also just plain and simple browsing/reading) all what you are doing on your desktop computer? Or are there other major usage scenarios that just not yet someone driven by the perspective of the current context of the user is taking care of in a big way (or maybe there is already someone)?
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Mai 1st, 2007 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Issues explained. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Oktober 3rd, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Glamour Photography Agency…
hey great stuff…
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