Oded Ilan recently joined Ed Marsh to talk about his upcoming LavaCon presentation, Personalization of Content and the Power of Metrics. Currently the Chief Marketing Officer of Iridize, Oded’s start in content can be traced back to his degree in English literature. When he joined the world of high tech, he quickly learned the experience of writing and telling stories could be used to make a living: marketing and sales is all about telling stories. In the end, it’s content creation.

People working with content know that managers want metrics, but some metrics are easier to capture than others. For example, when there is a change in the user interface, we can measure the impact by the number of clicks. But how do you use metrics to follow a “solution”? How do you measure the effectiveness of support or training materials? When content is used once or twice, there is usually no option to know if an application’s feature was used as a result of the content related to that feature.

That’s where personalization steps in. Personalization is the other side of metrics. When you have metrics that give you an understanding of what people are doing, what types of people are doing it, and what people in the same environment are doing, you can combine that data with intelligent algorithms to launch content to users based on that activity. The end result is personalized, contextualized content.

Analytics show how people behave, which translates into dollars.

Think about solutions that let you see the number of times content is being used. Let’s say you are able to cross-reference that with the number of support calls reduced to the organization. You can then present the amount saved to the organization. When organizations decide to save money, they decide to cut things they do not understand. But they definitely understand money. And they understand numbers. This is a simple demonstration to management of how much you are worth to the organization.

About Our Guest

Even before Oded Ilan had graduated from the university in 1999, he spent 4 years as a high school teacher. Following graduation, Oded worked in various high-tech industries as a business developer. He still believes that his hardest “sell” to date was convincing children to “purchase” education. Getting the message across, creating appealing yet meaningful content and delivering the correct story to the customers has always been a passion of Oded’s. As Iridize’s Chief Marketing Officer, he gets to see, first hand, how technology helps the training and documentation landscape with a new approach.

Iridize is a Platinum Sponsor of The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and TechComm Management. Be sure to stop by the booth in the vendor hall and say hello!

About Our Host

Ed Marsh is proud to be from New Jersey. He uses the Oxford comma, and never uses two spaces after a period. He is a technical writer at Goldman Sachs, and the creator and host of the Content Content podcast. Find him at edmarsh.com and @edmarsh on Twitter.

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