Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

When John Lovett of Jupiterresearch took the podium at the end of the first day of the conference, I thought, "This better be good." By 4pm, we were all on major information overload.

Working on several Web projects that require dynamic content, I was curious to see what John was going to share with us. What perhaps stood out the most to me was his acknowledgment of the challenge of creating dynamic content for business-to-business sites. He also showed examples of dynamic content and reassured us that it could be as simple as adding an image gallery to introduce the concept to a nervous client.

My favorite example was Hotels.com going from a community of 'experts' who post their opinion of hotels to a community of hotel-goers like you and me. He had us raise our hand if we went online to check user reviews of our hotel for this trip, and most of us lifted a hand. It's perfect. Hotels.com has dynamic content, we're providing it for them (thus cutting back on their internal resources) and it's what we want to read anyway.

I take back hotels.com as my favorite example now. It had to be the Target example. Think of the last product search you did on their site - let's say for a blender. The actual content of the product information is maybe two or three paragraphs. The rest is star ratings from users, comments from purchasers, recommendations of other products bought by blender buyers, and the list goes on. Target has dynamic content nailed. At least for now.

The trick is business-to-business. Like John said, that's a tougher nut to crack. I will now (thanks to John) look at my online Target and travel experiences to come up with ideas to address my client's needs dynamically.