I'm getting ready to head down to We Media Miami 2010, where Genuine Interactive is a media sponsor this year. As the former web producer for the conference and someone who has attended/worked every one of them since the beginning, there are a lot of reasons why I am drawn to this event. It's eye-opening, thought-provoking and best of all, it provides a glimpse of the future reality that we will all be living in. But that would take too long to fully explain.

Instead, I made a Wordle that lists the sessions, speakers and sponsors of this year's event (click the thumbnail for the larger version).

If you have any requests or comments, email me at chad AT genuineinteractive DOT com, comment here, or @reply to @wearegenuine.

Be sure to follow the #WeMedia hashtag between March 9-11. It's gonna be HUGE. But don't take my word for it. Look at these screengrabs from the two days of the conference last year. At its peak each day, #WeMedia was only competing with Jesus and Apple. 

You can make your own Satan and Microsoft jokes, and of course #iestories had a few of those last year as I recall too.

Today, I walked up Boylston Street where a yoga instructor was giving out yellow pamphlets good for one free yoga lesson.  I watched as pamphlets were eagerly handed  to every single person ahead  of me.   Then when I got within pamphlet handing distance – no pamphlet for me.  The instructor was doing what marketers have been since the beginning of time - audience segmentation.  Online, we use cookies as one tool that can help us deliver the right content to the right people based on their behavior.  On Boylston Street, real cookies took part in visually sending a message that I’m too fat for yoga.  Chips Ahoy, beotches.

We’re all familiar with Amazon’s pioneering ways of delivering a custom experience based on user behavior.  But we're used to seeing custom content, products etc.  Now, many of our clients outside of the ecommerce world are trying to create customized visual experiences for their online audience segments.  In simple terms – they want to site to change look and feel according to who’s surfing it.  In a scenario where a brand has a bizarro-audience of teens and baby boomers – image set A is of Abercrombian shirtless teens and B) is of steel-haired,  perfect-toothed boomers walking on the beach in white cotton pants rolled up as the waves gently touch their aging feet. (As a side note, if you have imagery like that on your site,  smash your monitor.  Do it.)

The visual story you weave for the potential customer is a large factor in their decision of whether or not they engage with your brand.  So, why shouldn’t we try to tailor the visual experience on sites in a fashion similar to Amazon’s content delivery strategy?  We should within reason – its easy to overanalyze the different colors or types of imagery that will appeal to an engineer vs. a lawyer.  A mom vs. a dad.  A CEO vs. a CFO.  A good audience segmentation strategy should consider all the potential differences between customer types but take into account that too much segmentation can seem contrived and gimmicky.  Audience segmentation is critical and effective when used in moderation.  Just like cookies and yoga.

I like to do this while eating Upper Crust BBQ pizza.  I call it the husky 

locust.