I talk a lot about the value in personalizing your radio station’s website and content such that my version of WXXX is different from yours.
What’s the point in this, you might ask?
The point is that value accrues to that which can be customized to my own interests and tastes. Indeed, it is the essence of digital technology in all its connected forms that my experience should be under my own control and will in all likelihood be different from yours.
That’s not only a good thing – it’s the way the world is moving whether we like it or not.
In other words, because it is possible it becomes inevitable, and it will invariably be driven by consumers.
In any given car that rolls off the Detroit assembly line, my dashboard will soon look different from yours. I don’t mean my model will be built differently from yours. I mean when I sit in the driver’s seat the dash will resemble my tastes – and when you sit in it it will resemble yours. It will be customizable and connected.
So it is every time you log on to Netflix, for example. Or iTunes. Or Pandora. Or virtually any site that allows you to make comments (like this one). Each is a form of customization and personalization.
Your consumers want to consume your content through their own reference frame and in their own way. Woe unto you if you don’t enable that capacity.
In this video, I walk through an illustration of this from outside radio.
Integrating Facebook or Twitter in this way is not brain surgery. Indeed, Triton Digital (and, no doubt, others to come) are in the process of enabling just this kind of easy social sign-on across their service offerings. This was the topic I discussed recently with the folks from Janrain (see that conversation for more).
But wait, you may ask, once consumers can customize our content, doesn’t that mean we need to stockpile content worth customizing?
Why yes it does.
One of the truisms of the Internet is this: People only spend their time on stuff that matters to them. And people only want to customize (i.e., surrender personal information, however effortlessly) that which offers them value in exchange.
The world is now fine-tuned to my tastes and yours.
The control is in the hands of the consumer.
Yield it. Or your competition will.