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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. Users 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 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.
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