Wiley Content Management Bible, 2nd Edition
Contents
1. To analyze your audiences you can follow these steps 1 Define your potential audiences If your organization doesn t already have a well defined audience document expect to spend several iterations refining your audience definition with key stakeholders 2 Refine your list of audiences Determine how the CMS can help you serve each audience better and also reach your goals 3 For each audience on your final list e Identify them by giving each audience a name and chart ing the characteristics that describe it e Describe their demographics using a narrative that explains the audience and how they benefit from your organization Also include descriptive characteristics such as their jobs technical savvy and traditional demo graphics as well as the size of this audience 518 Part IV Designing a CMS e 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 ove2. although a CMS can make localization a lot easier it remains an expensive and slow process I claim no great expertise in localization I ve seen more aborted attempts at localization than lt 7 I have successes So my goal in this discussion isn t to present a comprehensive account of localization or to survey the current trends but rather to present a set of concepts and vocabulary around localization that can weave into the fabric of my wider discussions of content management What is localization Localization is the process of making content as understandable as possible in the variety of cultures in which people view it I m going to work back from this definition to one that s more useful in the context of a CMS The definition has the following three major concepts Culture I want to keep this very complex issue as simple as possible and define culture as a set of shared communication and behavior standards that a group of people adopts and upholds Not all that long ago geography was the main indicator of culture People who lived near each other shared a culture Today that s too simple a way to look at it As anyone who s walked down the street in any major city of the world can tell you cul tures aren t countries Today I d define culture as a dynamic mix of language region ethnicity and other affiliations However to stay within the general bounds of the accepted localization terminology I use the w
3. factual data about your audiences that it can use to select content To analyze audi ences for a CMS you must perform the following tasks Name and identify each one Collect as much demographic and statistical data as you can on each one Understand and account for the attitudes of the audiences in the construction of your content and publications Decide what publications audiences are most likely to compare yours to and make sure that your publications compare favorably Understand the uses that each audience is likely to make of your publications and make sure that you serve those uses Create profiles for each audience that indicate definitively which users are in which audience In the next chapter I discuss the complex task of fully analyzing and designing your publications
4. locality a group of people must share a set of communication assumptions that you care to cater to Given the amount of work that catering to communication assumptions involves you re unlikely to create a locality for every group that you may discover Rather you identify the following types of localities A primary locality This type is the default locality for your content The most popular primary locality today is International English This locality assumes a fluency in the English language but tries to use no expressions or styles that are idiomatic to a partic ular region where English is spoken Constituent localities These types are all the localities where you expect people to use your publications Key localities These types are the localities that you choose to actually serve To implement localization in a CMS you group all the constituent localities into a few key localities You choose the key localities to cover the widest set of constituents possible The primary locality serves as the master content that you then localize into the assumptions of the key localities I m aware that the primary locality of this book is American Techno English This locality a involves the set of communication assumptions common to educated middle and upper class citizens of the United States who have a strong affiliation to the Web and electronic publication communities If you re not in this group apologize for making t
5. to reach out to each person and serve that person individually The computer many believe can know you and serve you the way that the corner grocer used to Personally I can t imagine a computer leaving me with the same feeling as the retailers of my youth But personality aside is an audience size of one obtainable in your organization And if it s even technically feasible is driving toward that much segmentation advisable First you need to determine what level of audience segmentation is feasible Considering that most publishing systems in use today don t have any notion of audiences that is they serve one conglomerate audience you may be best off by beginning modestly You may ask What s the smallest number of audiences that we can divide our users into and still derive tangible business benefit Or you may ask What audience segments does everybody agree on today or even Can we latch onto one or two traits to use to divide our users into just two segments Regardless of how ambitious your approach is the following things are sure You need at least a few cycles of defining and refining audiences before you can know for sure that you have it right If your organization s worked at this goal for a while you can perhaps say right now who your key audiences are If not expect to start some where and continue to refine toward a stable set of audiences Chapter 25 Cataloging Audiences 523 Your au
6. you really expect to serve the range of people you ve identified What are your current communications How well and in what ways are you in touch with your audiences now Are they satisfied What are the opportunities to increase satisfaction Are any feedback channels established If so what feedback has come through Who are the key members Can you find members of key audiences to review your work as the project progresses and help you ensure that your CMS produces the right publications 530 Part IV Designing a CMS Plan The following sections break your audience analysis into a set of design constraints that you should collect and account for from each audience you intend to serve Identification Begin your analysis by charting the main identifying characteristics of your audiences Come up with a response to the following audience design constraints to help you keep track of and rank your audiences ID Assign each audience a unique identifier so that you can later use it in the CMS for profiles and rules Name Choose a descriptive but memorable name for each audience so that the staff accepts the name and uses it consistently in conversation Rank Give each audience a priority rank You rank audiences relative to each other if possible Members are priority one for example and in country staff are priority two If you can t reach agreement on relative ranking rate them all according to an externa
7. Cataloging a Audiences In This Chapter A audience is a group of people that is defined by both a com mon set of traits shared by its members and by your decision to deliver value to that group in the form of content or functionality In this section I discuss the idea of audiences from the perspectives of marketing software development and writing I discuss how you Serving versus exploiting your audiences Looking at audiences through the lens of a may go about segmenting users into audiences and then I detail the CMS information that you need to capture about each of your audiences so that you can deliver the best content to them Collecting information about your audiences It never ceases to amaze me how much lip service people pay to Horna legicaleesion understanding their audiences and how little real effort they put into doing so I ve never run into someone who disagrees with the state ment You must understand who you re serving if you re to serve them well On the other hand I know of precious few who do any thing more than a cursory analysis of those they intend to serve Cataloging Audiences Jumpstart This Jumpstart summarizes what you need to do to include localiza tion in your CM process and system Use this jumpstart as a summary without the weight of detail or as a quick review if you ve already read the chapter and want a checklist of what you need to do localization
8. ation What vocab ulary and usage does the audience expect and respect Openness to giving data How much personal data such as the design constraints in the preceding Demographics section does this audience want to give What profile collection methods do members most respect and support Are they likely to be con cerned if you buy information about them from outside sources direct marketing companies for example Comparisons Come to know your competition By emulating the characteristics of the publications that each audience respects and avoiding the characteristics that they don t like you can signifi cantly boost the acceptance of your own publications The following constraints tell you what publications and organizations each audience is likely to compare you to 532 Part IV Designing a CMS Benchmark publications What for this audience are the most well known and respected publications that cover the same information that you do Include competi tors Web sites and other publications as well as commercial publications such as mag azines and books What publications aren t well regarded by this audience and why Current publications What publications from your organizations and others do people from this audience most commonly read Where do your current publications for this audience rate relative to the field of benchmark publications Value proposition If you provide value in your publica
9. bor B just moved in and has been researching long distance phone plans all day She looks with interest on the ad and says How fortuitous to get this today I wish that every phone company had sent me one However thin and imprecise the line is between service and exploitation a line still exists And in your own publications you can choose to cross it or not rm For the record forbid you to use any of the techniques that mention in this book to manip i ulate or behave unethically toward your audiences Content Mismanagement In an inner city elementary school a few years ago there was a librarian who kept books from children and children from books The librarian didn t teach children how to use libraries they were not made to feel at home and their curiosity was not welcomed The library shelves were almost naked but the librarian stood in the way of parents and teachers who were trying to get more books A working library includes book checkout return and a functioning catalogue so a student can learn to get from subject author or title to a book on the shelf This library had none of those and students even teachers couldn t predictably find a book without asking the librarian The books on the shelves didn t match the catalogue the numbers swung wildly as did the alphabet The librarian used a personal system instead of the system used at other schools and libraries When asked how students were to l
10. ce does your organization cur rently communicate with at all How many do you communicate with on a regular basis Demographics What ages sexes races regions languages and other such data describe people in this audience Localities In which of your localities do people from this audience reside Published data Are any sources of data on these people available for you to access Chapter 25 Cataloging Audiences Platforms What publishing channels can these people access You can assume that they re capable of receiving print publications but do they have e mail A fax machine Personal digital assistants PDAs Can they access the Web If so what operating sys tems connection bandwidth and Web browsers do they use Technical savvy How technically literate are these people Specifically what kinds of user interfaces are they comfortable with What technical terms can you assume that they know What functionality are they likely to accept and use Are they likely for example to do downloads Installations Transactions Attitudes Learning the attitudes that members of each audience are likely to hold toward your organi zation and content is an important task for you From knowledge of attitudes you can craft the appropriate messaging for each audience The following constraints help you understand how the audience may react to your content Credibility According to Aristotle the perceived credibility of t
11. diences change over time Not only do your segments get smaller and smaller but you also begin to expand toward audiences that you may not have been initially prepared to serve or that present themselves as good opportunities to broaden your constituency Second what level of audience segmentation is desirable One to one marketing would have you believe that you should aim to serve segments of one You should know each person as an individual and target each one personally Supposing that this task is even feasible that is that you can put in place the technology to accomplish it I d question whether it s gener ally desirable What does having audience segments of one really do for you Most argue that the benefit lies in increased loyalty and a better sense of service and trust Maybe so but it comes with a cost as well as the following list describes Content differentiation Can you segment and tag your content so thoroughly that it s different for each person who receives it Traits Can you create and maintain user profiles that are rich enough to differentiate every user Leverage Do you want to forgo the capability to develop messages with wide appeal and leveragability over a large number of people The whole concept of one person audiences flies in the face of audience analysis Authors don t create different content for each person They create different content for each kind of person It contradicts too t
12. ely many people simply don t understand enough to know that localization is a core issue of a CMS Either they believe that users take on the burden of understanding the language and conventions of the native culture of the organization or they think that simply translating some of the text of the system as an afterthought is enough Especially in the United States but clearly in every country to some degree an ignorance of the need for localization has helped prevent localization s wide scale application 524 Part IV Designing a CMS Note Difficulty Localization is hard It adds a lot of complexity to an already complex sys tem Variations in language and especially variations in content structure combine to drive up the effort and in turn the cost of a localized CMS In a rapidly globalizing world staying ignorant of the need to localize for very long is difficult And indeed over the course of my time in the computer information field I ve seen the con sciousness and understanding of localization grow from a few voices to a full discipline and industry A CMS can t help you much in raising the consciousness of your organization about the need to localize but it can deal quite effectively with the difficulty of localization You can hand off a lot of the effort and organization that surrounds localization to a CMS A CMS can organize the localization effort but it can t do the localization That requires people So
13. ence is quite another You re probably not going to choose to put the literal words of the value equation on the home page for this audience But what do you do How do you clearly show the agreement the publication is willing to make Sometimes a simple headline is enough to get the message across PLAN for example may detect that a staff member logs into its site and so prominently displays the tag line Promote PLAN in 30 seconds Feedback How do you monitor the acceptability of the value equation over time to your audiences You may or may not have the wherewithal to hold focus groups and send out surveys but what do you do to make sure that your equation stays in balance while you re continuing to deliver more to both sides Correctly assessing the uses that your audiences make of your publications is critical to your success If they re likely to come to your publications with certain tasks in mind discover them and tailor your publications to help each user accomplish her goal The following design constraints help you catalog the tasks and goals that a particular audience may have Goals What are the top three things that this audience wants from each publication that you target to it Use cases For each goal develop one or more scenarios of an audience member com ing to the publication with that goal in mind Chart out the actions that the user may Chapter 25 Cataloging Audiences 533 take and the assumption
14. ers are the consumers of computer applications Users access an application through a user interface To be successful a user interface must be usable Usability testers recruit representatives of user groups and watch them use the application to see whether it works well for them What are these user groups if they re not audiences Today s hot design process Unified Modeling Language UML makes the link to audiences even more tangible Programmers use UML to model the way that you use an application before they put any effort into programming it UML defines roles as the types of people who re likely to use an application In UML you create a set of use cases that define what a type of person wants to accomplish and how you can expect her to go about accomplishing it For an electronic publication audiences are users In fact I call audience members users throughout this book as I discuss people interacting with Web sites and other electronic pub lications Thus application usability user groups and use cases apply literally to much of what a CMS produces In fact I carry the notions of usability and use cases forward into my discussion of CMS audi ence analysis As part of the audience analysis that you do for a CMS you can define a set of use cases and usability concerns for each audience How many audiences do you have The Web gave rise to the notion of one to one electronic marketing The idea is to use tech nology
15. f the world After you complete this exercise for each audience you combine your individual analyses into one overall profile analysis that charts all the traits that you intend to measure and how you expect to use these traits to decide who s in what audience The following constraints help you work through a thorough cataloging of the traits that you want to distinguish for each audience Trait names What list of traits uniquely separates this audience from the rest of the world Traits may be personal age sex language and so on or professional job title company type profession and so on Trait values For each trait determine what type of metadata field it is free text pattern text Boolean and so on For more information on metadata fields see Chapter 24 Working with Metadata in the section Categorizing Metadata Fields This informa tion helps you build a user profile database or XML schema later PLAN for example may designate that donors are most likely married with grown children aged 50 or older and making more than 100 000 per year Collection For each trait determine how you value it for each person who uses your publications You re likely to find that some traits are nearly impossible to assess with out asking See Chapter 32 Designing Personalization in the section Personalization and the audience for more information about collecting data about audience members Minimu
16. fact that illustrations are technically much harder to translate you can embed a lot of local context in illustrations that can make them confusing outside their locality of origin I use a picture of a standard organizational chart for example to discuss information flow in the organization See Chapter 14 Working within the Organization in the section Tracking Information Flow in the Organization If that standard chart is unknown in your locality in no way does my illustration help you to understand the concept In fact it s likely to con fuse you more Localization and content management Localization and content management go hand in hand In fact I d go so far as to say that the central issues of localization are among the central issues of content management as the fol lowing list discusses Collection How do you author or acquire content in a way that frees it from its context by explicitly stating its context For localization you make content free from its locality by tagging the parts that are locality bound In content management in general you make content free from any particular audience or publication by tagging the places that are audience or publication specific In both cases you re not trying to remove the context of the content but rather to explicitly state it so that you can formulate and 527 528 L Part IV Designing a CMS implement logical rules for the use of the c
17. fect of your audience analysis on the ongoing maintenance of the CMS Then fill in the following table to define any tasks that you imagine must happen on a recurring basis to run the CMS Here are some task types to get you thinking Periodic audience surveys Review of the current set of audiences Audience focus groups Retrieval of user data that you buy periodically Retiring inactive profiles from the user database Review of the traits that make up each audience Review of site logs to discover audience activity Ongoing use case and usability testing Periodic review of competing publications Chapter 25 Cataloging Audiences 545 Finally fill in the following table I ve provided a sample entry How Much Can be simple one hour phone based focus meetings How Collect Web feedback Task Name Who What When 1 Audience Marketing Use Web feedback Once at focus groups Analyst to find participants start up and once per year thereafter 2 Recruit participants 3 Plan and conduct meetings 4 Debrief CMS team on results The required information includes the following Task name Give the task a short but memorable name that describes it Who Indicate what person or role is responsible for accomplishing this task Naming an automated process here instead of a person is acceptable What Describe how the person or process accomplishes the task When Specify at what
18. frequency this task needs to be accomplished or how you know when it must occur How much Describe how much or how many of this sort of task you expect to do A numerical quantity is preferable here but if you can t come up with one words such as a lot not much and so on suffice How Detail the skills tools or processes the person or process must have to accom plish this task Don t worry if the tasks that you come up with at this point are somewhat ill defined or sketchy In your workflow analysis in Chapter 33 Designing Workflow and Staffing Models you have ample opportunity to refine them Integrate After you make your way through your audience analysis or make at least one or two passes through it consider the following questions to help you tie the results of your analysis together and to the rest of the logical design The right set Look back over each audience Do all the answers hang together Did you need to answer questions with a lot of qualifiers and exceptions Did you find a lot of diverse job descriptions for example in the same audience category Could you identify a person who was typical of this audience If you have the feeling that a partic ular audience has no center that s a good indication that you may need to break it into smaller parts The right number Ask yourself again Can you really serve the number of audiences that you ve analyzed If not can you combine s
19. he basic idea that organizations serve constituent groups and not isolated individuals They craft value products services information that appeals to a kind of person and not to an aggregation of lone individuals who are more different than the same So if the extra work of very small audiences doesn t stop you the lack of real value to your organization may On the other hand in some cases certain aspects of one to one marketing do work identifying users for example and then providing them with their purchase history or as Amazon com does sending e mail messages announcing books that may interest a reader based on past purchases In this last example conceivably no two people receive the same series of e mail messages Audiences and Localization Localization is the process of making content as understandable as possible in the variety of cultures that view it Most simply put if you want people from more than one culture to use your content you d better think about localization Communication is at the center of a CMS How you communicate depends a lot on the culture of the person with whom you re communicating Thus a CMS that communicates well with people of various cultures has localization at its core As central as localization may be how ever I ve rarely seen it at the core of a CMS Rather it s normally at the periphery and is most often an afterthought Why Following are two reasons Ignorance Unfortunat
20. he following list describes Look and feel In publications you spend a lot of time figuring out how to make your publications communicate certain emotions and intangible ideas This area may be the most locality bound part of a CMS What color imagery sound and text style com municates which emotion varies a lot from locality to locality What in one locality says elegant may in a different locality say bizarre Messages These concepts are the key ideas that you want a user to take away from your publications See Chapter 26 Designing Publications in the section Messages Messages are locality bound The immediate message especially which you communi cate as much by look and feel as by words may not map well between localities Tone A general tone casual formal official friendly and so on is often hard to repli cate across localities without major reauthoring In this book for example I try to maintain a casual and friendly tone In some localities such a tone may very well read as disrespectful or even comical Examples You use examples to bring a concrete and tangible reference to bear on an abstract concept As references examples are locality bound Examples must address the experience of your audience but must also make sense to your various localities Illustrations You use illustrations to summarize complex concepts or capture the essence of the text around them Aside from the
21. he speaker is more important than what she says in determining whether she s convincing to the audience How do you establish credibility with this audience How much credibility do you have now with its members Have you experienced any particular failures or successes in the past with these people Current beliefs What does this audience already know and believe about the subjects that your content addresses as well as about your organization Are you reinforcing or trying to change existing attitudes Do members have any particularly strong positive or negative beliefs that you need to take into account Ask yourself What do people of this ilk trust respect like know and believe Argument What do members of this audience consider good arguments and exam ples Do they respond more to a logical or an emotional appeal Must you cite certain sources or quote particular people for them Can you leverage scenarios or examples that the audience has already heard of Maybe for example you can assume that PLAN s press audience has heard about and closely followed a recent famine Can you cite information about the famine or otherwise use it as an example to show relevance to this audience Style What tone and presentation style does this audience expect and respond to Can you advance the expected style to a new level in a way that shows respect for the exist ing style and innovation if that is the audience responds to innov
22. hings easier for me and harder for you by using words such as Techno English 526 Part IV Designing a CMS Audiences and locality Audiences and localities aren t the same concept An audience certainly may all reside in a single locality but an audience may also spread over a range of localities I ve heard some people advocate dividing each locality into its own audience from the start The idea is that each locality exhibits such a different set of needs that it s necessarily a different group Well maybe but then again maybe not I think that assuming that you always find big differences between localities is just as wrong as assuming that all localities are the same which is the argument that people sometimes make to avoid localization altogether The chief lesson that audience analysis teaches you is not to assume anything but instead to find out Your best bet I believe is to define your audience segments based on the content needs that you can identify and cater to If those needs happen to divide people by language or regional lines fine If not that s fine too In any case don t confuse localization with audience A Spanish speaking person in Chile may share more significant traits with a Russian speaker in Israel than with a Chilean in the next office Just because one can t read Russian and the other can t read Spanish doesn t make them two audiences It makes them members of two localities Different a
23. ier in this chapter for the definitions of these terms Then fill in the following constraints to document your overall approach to localities ID Create a unique identifier for each locality that you can identify Name Create a name that you can use to refer to this locality later Language What language or languages does this locality speak Region In what geographical locations do people in this locality live Affiliation What significant affiliations for example social political religious do people in this locality have that affect the way that you communicate with them Service Is this locality your primary locality a key locality or a constituent locality If it s a constituent locality what key locality serves it Does the key locality fully encompass this locality or are people from this locality less than optimally served If you expect the Russian key locality to serve all Eastern European localities for exam ple what respect or understanding do you lose from nonnative Russian speakers Audience To what audiences do people from this locality belong Does studying the locality add anything to your audience analysis Key member Can you get a representative from this locality to serve as an advisor to your project Traits How do you know that a user is in this locality List the traits and decide how you can collect them and how you can ensure that they re accurate Tasks Consider the ef
24. l scale Members and staff are high priority for example whereas the press is a low priority Key member For each audience identify an exemplar to whom you can point as a concrete example of the group The person may or may not be available to your group on an ongoing consulting basis but you should at least meet with the key member once to get a solid feeling for what people of this audience are like If your audience is in more than one locality can you get a key member from each main locality Demographics Beyond simple identification you should study the kind of people you expect to be in each audience The following constraints help you get to know the kinds of people who are in a particular audience Personal description Craft a short essay that gives someone who s never met any members of this audience a clear idea of who they are The essay should give a sense of the kinds of people in this audience and what they stand to gain personally from an affiliation with your organization Make sure that your entire team reads and agrees with the description Job description What kind of job or jobs do people in this audience hold Do they all share similar job tasks or responsibilities What can these people gain professionally from an affiliation with your organization Full size How many people in the entire world fit into the description of this audience Current size How many people who fit into this audien
25. les to the mate rials that each group is to receive Profiles are sets of traits and trait values that you can group together to define a kind of person Traits are another form of metadata They consist of data about a person Traits such as age sex interests pages viewed job type and time on the site for example may be at your disposal and you can use them to define segments You may create a segment that you call Info Addicts for example that consists of males between the ages of 16 and 25 who spent a lot of time on your site Based on the age and sex of a visitor which you ask or otherwise obtain and the time that visitor spends on the site which you measure you can determine who is and who s not an Info Addict Of course the next question is So what What do you do differently with an Info Addict than with any other visitor 522 Part IV Designing a CMS Marketers use segmentation information to understand and speak to a market segment They may design an ad campaign for example to reach these info addicts and draw them to your site The kind of advertisements that Info Addicts receive are different from those that a seg ment that you call say Casual Browsers receives You can use this same approach in your CMS to identify audiences and target content to them Audiences and users I ve never heard programmers use the word audience but as they talk about users program mers are using the same concept Us
26. m as general guides to localization e Cross Reference ER A Conservation of work A CMS doesn t reduce the amount of work that publishing content takes it merely shifts the burden of that work from a human to a computer In localization you want to adopt the attitude that your job is to put as much of the work as possible onto the CMS You can however only shift it so far If you want con tent that s useful to people you can t escape that fact that people must do a core of the work Balance of generality The more general that you make your content the easier it is to reuse The more general it is however the less it communicates You must balance a CMS between the constraints of reusability and strong communication Similarly you must balance the need to communicate at all with your key localities with your need to communicate well with your primary locality Whenever I say on the fly I tip the bal ance a bit toward my primary locality to give them deeper and wider understanding at the expense of other localities that may get less understanding For a view of how localization fits into the larger CM picture see Chapter 39 Building Management Systems in the section Localization System An Example Audience Set As in all logical design examples that I provide I use the nonprofit organization PLAN International as my semi hypothetical example organization For the sake of illustratio
27. m requirements If you can t collect all the trait data on a person what s the minimum amount that you consider sufficient to qualify a person as part of an audi ence This constraint is where the profile rubber hits the road If you choose too little trait information you miscategorize a lot of people and upset them If you choose too much trait information you can t always collect it all for each audience member and you may end up with too few people who actually benefit from the targeted content that the audience receives Default audiences What do you do with people you can t place in an audience Do you create a general audience type that gets all content Put unknowns in one of the other audience groups If all else fails you can try asking users to categorize themselves If 534 Part IV Designing a CMS you do so instead of asking them to fill in a bunch of metadata fields show them the personal and professional descriptive paragraphs that you wrote and ask them which one they think best describes them Make sure that you provide a none of the above choice and a space where users can write in their own descriptions thus providing you with invaluable feedback about the categories that you create Localization Brainstorm the full list of localities that may visit your publications Group your list into con stituent key and one primary locality See the section Audiences and Localization earl
28. n I assume that PLAN came up with the following set of key audiences in order of priority in their requirements gathering process Members This audience consists of all those who join PLAN and pay a monthly fee to support a child and a community somewhere in the world In country staff This audience consists of all those who reside in diverse locations around the world and need to know what s happening in the organization Chapter 25 Cataloging Audiences 579 Donors This audience consists of all those who make major grants to the organization Press This audience consists of all those who learn about and provide publicity for the organization As I move through the description of audience analysis I draw on these hypothetical audi ences for examples Analyzing Audiences In the sections that follow I lay out a methodology for coming to understand the audience segments that you must create In addition I supply some logical design criteria that you can use to fully describe each segment As I do with all the entities in your logical design I break the analysis into questions to get you to think methods that you can use to plan and ques tions to help you integrate your audience analysis The key to finding the right set of audiences is to look within your organization to see how it divides constituents now in order to be sure that you re making the most of what your organi zation already knows Find out how
29. nt 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 Chapter 25 Cataloging Audiences The mail is a flyer advertising a long distance telephone plan Neighbor A has a plan and is happy with it She feels put upon and manipulated and says I hate all these advertisements trying to get me to buy something Neigh
30. ocate books in his system the librarian answered Every library has its idiosyncrasies and the children know mine Even if that were true is the purpose of a school library for students to learn a unique and idiosyncratic system or conventional library skills that can be used in other libraries and throughout their lives The librarian kept many books locked away out of the general collection and most new books never got put on the shelves As a result even the school PTA stopped donating books to the library The librarian repeatedly stated I will not change and that rather than alter his system in my library he would forfeit funding to get books and in fact he did so Teachers objections weren t able to change the librarian s ways so most classes didn t use the library Instead teachers kept limited book collections in their classrooms Many children were robbed of irreplaceable time and precious opportunities Each day was an irredeemable loss to children who pass this way but once It s already a struggle for kids to get a decent education There can be no waste of scarce resources But this librarian was not forced out he left in his own time only when he became eli gible for retirement In this century we have learned the hard way that evil flourishes when good people do nothing When children are deprived of tools for understanding the world because a school library is run as the librarian s p
31. ome together for the present until you 536 Part IV Designing a CMS get more time or funding to expand On the other hand can you serve more audiences than you now have How would you further subdivide the audiences if you had the chance Goals How do your audiences support your CMS project goals and vice versa Are these the right audiences for your goals If you could deliver the right content to these audiences would you really be closer to meeting your organization s goals Are any other goals suggested by your analysis Are these the right goals for your audiences Are any others suggested Agreement Is your organization in agreement about these audiences What must you do to see this set accepted as the set of audiences that your organization serves Are the stakeholders in your organization all likely to agree with the way that you ve divided and ranked audiences Can you hand off the ongoing audience analysis to a marketing or public relations group How will you ensure that other analyses further refine rather than contradict this analysis Understanding Do your sponsors and project team understand these audiences Do they understand and support the value proposition and are they likely to agree to abide by it Summary The notion of an audience for the purposes of a CMS isn t so different from other prevailing views What a CMS needs however is more than just a good notion of an audience it needs a lot of
32. on and affiliations Following are some examples of localities that illustrate the concept Turkey You define this locality by a region Turkey Regardless of the language that some inhabitants may speak you use Turkish to communicate and regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliations Kurds Moslems and so on you speak to them as secu lar Moslems You would create this locality if you were opening an office in Istanbul Francophones You define this locality by language French Regardless of location Africa Europe North America and any other affiliations citizenship political persua sion religion and so on you speak to this audience in French You may create a local ity such as this one if you discover that 30 percent of your product inquiries come from French speaking people Social conservatives You define this locality by an affiliation It includes people that may be offended by words or images that depict the human body or allude to sex You may create this locality to acknowledge the fact that half the people who visit your Web site come from regions or religions where conservative mores prevail Regardless of the language that they speak or the region where they live you speak to these peo ple without sexual words or images I choose the preceding three examples not because they re common ways that people localize but to make the point that a locality isn t always a language For you to consider it a
33. on to know another person is one thing For a computer to know a person is quite another For you or me a person isn t some set of data points she s a complex being whom we intuitively get You say that you know someone if you can recognize her and can accurately predict what she may do say and want No computer that I know of can get a person in this sense so you better settle for something less You can settle for coming up with a few isolated traits and using them to try to predict wants And amazingly that approach basically works In most of the circumstances that you face in a CMS you can limit the number of potential wants that you serve You can also draw wide enough distinctions between your users that determining who s who and what they probably want isn t too hard As you learn to discern more traits more accurately you can continue to get better at predicting more wants for more people Although many disciplines talk around or about audiences I ve never seen the concept nailed down enough to become specifically useful in the context of a CMS So in the following list I try to draw the elements of audiences out of the three different disciplines in which I ve seen the concept operate My goal is to piece together a use of the term audience that you can apply very specifically to a CMS From the discipline of writing and oral communication draw the idea of audience analysis which tries to define what y
34. ontent In a collection for example you can tag each example with the localities that it s useful for You can develop alternative examples for your other localities Management How do you store and administer content in such a way that people can find access and most easily use it In localization the point is to deliver content to the localization team as efficiently as possible Doing so may mean delivering only the examples that need translating to a particular language because you re tagging them for the locality that uses that language In the wider content management world of course management is responsible for delivering content to wherever it needs to go Publishing How do you ensure that the right content gets into the right publication in the right locations In localization this task is a matter of selecting the localized version of the content You may for example want to make your CMS select and display only examples that you tag for the locality of the current user In content management in general of course this concept is the central purpose of the entire publishing system Localization can come into play in any or all portions of your CMS design Thus I leave the detailed discussion of localization analysis and design to the specific applicable sections throughout this book I leave this section with the following two general principles of content management that apply especially well to localization and I offer the
35. ord locality and not culture to capture the concept of localization This has validity in the software development and larger busi ness world where often local subsidiaries of a company are responsible for handling the marketing of company products for their locality Understanding What makes content as understandable as possible Clearly the lan guage in which you write any text is the biggest factor But it s not just language As I discuss in the following section translation is only the start You must recognize and change a world of other more subtle local conventions Process Localization is a process In fact I d say that by and large it s an authoring process The content that someone authors for one locality someone else must then reauthor for another The localization process encompasses many mechanical parts where bits of content move from person to person for processing But after the content arrives on the localizer s screen the mechanics end and it becomes a human process of knowing what works in one locality or the other Note Chapter 25 Cataloging Audiences 525 So for the purpose of a CMS I define localization as follows An authoring process in which you make the communication conventions of your con tent optimally understandable in the various languages regions and affiliation groups that you care to serve What are your localities A locality is a specific combination of language regi
36. ou need to know to speak to a particular group of people From marketing I draw the notions of segmentation and profiling which tries to tie groups of people together by using data about them From computer science I draw the notion of the user as a kind of person that an application must serve psychologically and ergonomically From these three bases I construct the set of data that you can gather to understand serve and be served by your audiences Audiences and communicators Writers public speakers and other communication professionals have used the concept of an audience analysis for a long time A lot is written on this subject appearing in textbooks and the popular press Most of the work that I ve seen boils down to the following seemingly simple points Chapter 25 Cataloging Audiences 57 Who are these people objectively What are their ages interests jobs and other relevant data What does this audience already know and believe about this subject What are people s needs and desires for new information in your subject area What kind of presentation style are they likely to respond to favorably What publications do they already trust and to which are they likely to compare yours What s the author s relationship to this audience Is she a peer an expert or an outsider How do you establish credibility with this audience What do audience members consider good information
37. r 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 Serving versus Exploiting an Audience At the same time as you want to serve your audience you also wa
38. rivate kingdom and nobody can or will do something about it something is terribly wrong A great deal of content is being tragically mismanaged Donald J Horowitz former Superior Court Judge State of Washington Chair Access to Justice Technology Bill of Rights Committee Washington Access to Justice Board 519 520 Part IV Designing a CMS I believe that the key to staying on the right side of the line between service and exploitation is to place a value proposition at the base of your audience analysis For each audience that you expect to serve you must decide what its members want from you and what you want from them Then make sure that the equation is balanced If you re willing to give as much value as you expect from your audiences in return the relationship involves no exploitation Your value propositions can serve as the guiding principles behind every other part of how you work with this audience What Is an Audience Audiences are simply groups of people that you choose to serve in some way The first natural question to answer is How do I know someone who s in my audience from someone who s not The answer is to find the set of traits that distinguishes this audience from others and then figure out whether the person in question demonstrates these traits A trait is a specific characteristic of a person that you can discover store and combine with other characteristics to know this person For you a pers
39. s that she may make in navigating to the information and func tionality that helps her meet that goal What clues can you provide for this audience to indicate that certain content can be found in a particular place What wrong assump tions may users make that you want to account for ahead of time Usability Given the technical savvy of this audience how can you design your publica tions so that the users can reach their goals without being frustrated because they don t know how to use something Can you get a group of members from this audience to test your ideas and assumptions At this point in the analysis you should catalog all the usability concerns that your audience analysis leads you to Later when you actually start building publications you can run tests on the real publications Usage profiles How do you want this audience to use your publications One time periodically or consistently How much time do you expect members to spend per visit Disposition What dispositions are group members are likely to bring to a publication Do they need quick answers for example or are they casually browsing are they ready to take action or do they need information first do they know what they re looking for or do they want you to tell them what they re looking for and then get it for them Profiles For each audience type you need to decide the traits and trait values that distinguish that audience from the rest o
40. sources arguments and examples What tasks and purposes do your audience members have in mind as they approach your material This sort of analysis has motivated communicators from the ancient Greek rhetoricians to the modern technical writer and journalist I believe that it s a pretty good list of the sorts of information required to understand how to communicate with an audience Most of the time you conduct this analysis quite informally and it results in an intuitive feel that gives the communicator a sense of how to approach an audience For a CMS audience analysis you can make the answers to these questions explicit and relate them to the parts of the CMS that they re going to help structure Audiences and marketing I rarely hear marketing people use the word audience but I hear them talk about target mar kets all the time A market itself is a group of people with common concerns that motivate their behaviors basically it s an audience Within the broad market that an organization serves are market segments that consist of subgroups with identifiable traits and targetable needs Marketers are getting more and more precise in how they construct and manage segment data and how they target individuals Today s merchandizing and campaign management sys tems are very sophisticated in the ways that they divide people into categories or segments based on the data that they can collect or acquire These systems match profi
41. this book for example I discuss the wheel of content management The idea is that the relationships between content management entities is similar to that of the relationship between the parts of a wheel Does that metaphor make sense in all localities I hope so If not a large sec tion of this book needs reauthoring to fix the problem Connotations These conventions are the additional nuances of meaning that you ascribe to a word or phrase in addition to the main meanings that you find in a dictio nary Meanings are fairly standard but connotations vary widely by locality I choose Chapter 25 Cataloging Audiences the word component for example to describe classes of content partly for its connota tion to me I remember creating a stereo system out of what are generally known as components Each component is sold separately but together they make a wonderful sound References These conventions are specific mentions of people things or events that you use to make a point I frequently refer to Amazon at www amazon com for exam ple hoping that it s an example that s known to my audience regardless of locality I suspect that I m right but then I wouldn t know if I was wrong This list isn t exhaustive but it gives you a feeling for the kind of conventions that localization involves beyond simple translation To continue I turn now to the hot spots yet another idiomatic expression of localization as t
42. tions equal to their effort or expense for your audiences you create a stable system that continues to draw the audience and provides your organiza tion with the value that it deserves back from its efforts The following constraints help you work through a value proposition for each audience Benefit What do you want from this audience Include in your answer any actions Use buy try use encourage others and so on and any attitudes believe trust under stand know and so on that you want your publications to this audience to affect Cost What does this audience want from you What must you give its members for them to leave your publication with the highest level of satisfaction Balance What is the balance point between what you want from the audience and what its members want from you PLAN for example may want its in country staff to promote the organization in the towns and villages they serve in Staff may want more free time and less hassle translating materials into the local language The balance may be for PLAN to create a small sized print publication that consists only of pictures of children around the world who are involved in PLAN activities By producing such pub lications PLAN serves its own needs and also those of its staff Communication How do you communicate this value equation to this audience Crafting a balanced value proposition in the mind of your team is one thing Really crafting it with the audi
43. udiences get different content Different localities get the same content in different ways Nonetheless I choose the audience chapter as the spot for my major discussion of localiza tion for the following good reasons You direct most localization toward an audience Localities often are audiences A localization analysis shares much in common with an audience analysis What gets localized Obviously the main event of localization is translation Translating text and tracking your translations is a big job and may be all that you ever manage to do to localize your content As part of the translation or better as a part of the original authoring of your content how ever you want to consider the following more subtle communication conventions Idioms These conventions are word uses that are particular to a locality The phrase on the fly for example which I use frequently isn t in general use throughout the English speaking world and likely doesn t even have a good translation in many other languages So to localize a phrase such as on the fly may require more than translating the words It may require more than finding the corresponding expression in the other locality It may require a reauthoring of the phrase to get its true meaning across in dif ferent localities Metaphors These conventions are phrases that use one set of circumstances to illus trate a similar relationship in another set of circumstances In
44. your organization communicates with each audience now and what feedback it receives from those audiences For each audience you construct the set of personal traits for example age interests and so on that select a person into the audience These traits later serve as the user profiles on which you can build your personalization module To most effectively speak to each audience you must create a set of assumptions about what members like and dislike for example what motivates impresses and offends them You should find publications that they know and trust now and make sure that you re providing content that s consistent with their aims These assumptions give rise to the metadata that you add to your content so that the people who want that content the most can find it and get it delivered to them After defining all your audiences decide how they relate to each other to determine whether simultaneously serving the variety of audiences that you want is possible and to determine the kinds of metadata that most effectively capture the essential needs of each audience Think To help you ease into the analysis you can ask yourself and your organization the following set of questions Who is the primary audience Do you want to serve one group of people much more than the others If so how much are you willing to sacrifice the needs of the lesser audiences to those of the primary audience Do you have too many audiences Can
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