by Mike Lauruhn (mlauruhn@taxonomystrategies.com)
Just about every taxonomy design I’ve worked on has considered some type of Audience facet. Internally, companies want to designate that collateral is intended for different teams including Sales, Marketing, Engineering, and Product Management. Manufacturing companies can create public-facing content for their commercial site with content for Audiences including Developers, Investors, and Partners.
Despite being a fairly common facet, going out of the way to tag for audience segmentation can be problematic. It implies some type of filtering is going to take place. Upon evaluation, the content that most large organizations generate is relevant to multiple audiences. Instead, tagging for an Audience should only be done after an assessment of how much content is really meant for a single audience and how disparate the various audiences are. As an example, insurance companies have very different content for patients, doctors, and employers.
Appropriately applying Audience tags can be particularly powerful when combined with another frequently used facet: Content Type. Using these facets, feeds can be created and personalized for RSS or for creating compelling sidebars. ‘Press Releases’ for ‘Investors’ would have an entirely different feel than ‘Whitepapers’ for ‘Developers’ or ‘Case Studies’ for ‘Partners.’
In the last few years, we’ve had the opportunity to work on taxonomy projects for government clearinghouses. Typically when engaging in discovery for any project, we ask for existing materials and lists (or lists of lists) to help seed the taxonomy. In each of these cases, the types of materials added a new wrinkle to the definition of an audience. Lists called Audiences, People, Settings, and Demographics may have been generated independently with separate purposes in mind. All are legitimate lists and they make sense when you are looking at them one at a time. When you look at them together and try to sort out facets, they can become a bit murky. Is the audience the consumer of the content? Or who the content serves? Or who it’s about? And what is the difference?
In the context of clearinghouses, the mandate frequently involves providing content for delivery or application to one audience through a separate intermediary audience. For example, third grade science students via elementary science teachers, indigent patients via Health Care Providers, at-risk teens via Case Workers, etc. The science curriculum was not written with the intent of a third grader reading it, like the health care material was not written with the intent that the patient would read it. In addition to these intermediaries, the public content may also be used by concerned parents or friends and academic researchers who are new to a field and looking for concise information without sifting through web searches and make their own judgments about quality or authoritativeness. So who are the people the content is written for and who should receive the designation of Audience?
It’s seldom that we actually talk about categorizing facets, but in this case, it becomes important. Metadata fields are frequently broken up into distinctions such as Administrative Metadata, Structural Metadata, or Category Metadata. When breaking up facets, two distinct areas can be Filter facets or Subject facets.
In case of the clearinghouses terminology, Audience ends up as a Filter and the Demographic ends up as a Subject. For example, a report on trends in controlled substance abuse may be written for Case Workers (Facet: Audience) and about Homeless Veterans (Facet: Subject). Technically, it was not written for Homeless Veterans to read. Upon arriving at this collection of content, an end user (the case worker) could expand or narrow searches on the content collection. By removing one or the other facets, all content written for Case Workers could be revealed, or all content about Homeless Veterans can be revealed. By adding another filter, the case worker can narrow results. Perhaps the case worker is only interested in Homeless Veteran issues and content about the Pacific Northwest, United States, which is a topic from another subject filter. (Discussion about how Geography and Locations tagging fits in the realm of Subject or Filter facets may happen in the future.)
When organizing these lists and then categorizing them, it is always best to keep use cases fresh and at the forefront. Talking stakeholders through realistic and tangible examples of how their content can be clustered and disseminated is a key factor is getting valuable feedback in category design.
