“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ― Confucius

We’ve already discussed the importance and relevance of personalisation in previous posts. We’ll now tell you why we chose our preferred method of driving the data for personalisation, tagging.

Q. Why did we choose tagging?

A. For it’s simplicity

Tagging is a well established and arguably underused categorisation system that has seen prominence in blog use and more recently, social networks. It is all about assigning words or short keyword phrases to items to group them together. For example, items tagged as “event” would be grouped together if you searched on that tag.

Tagging is an effective and very simple categorisation system and by including it as one of the core features of mitingu we have leveraged this grouping to allow our users to create business intelligence based on the data they have.

One of the historical issues with tagging is that it places emphasis on the content creator to assign tags to their content and often laziness prevails and content is incorrectly tagged or not tagged at all. We’ve overcome this issue in mitingu as tags are automatically assigned to customers not events based on the information they give, not what is assumed.

Tags in mitingu can be used as filters for personalised content within web and email templates, ticket types and registration form questions. Email notifications can also be automatically sent based on an individual’s tag or tags.

Rather than having to write rules around different activities we use tags to simplify the process.

Here’s a simple example of tags used to create a personalised event site in mitingu.

Event name: The Good Wine Conference

Tags used: “red”, “white”, “rose”

Personalised elements: Main banner, intro text, agenda, registration type

Site 1 - John's personalised site

Site 2 - Jane's personalised site

Site 3 - Charles' personalised site