I’m all for personalisation and customisation. When done well, it can be a brilliant tool for helping people to feel part of a community.
But with anything good, there’s always a risk that something will go wrong if you’re not careful.
Hence why I had to chuckle when a recent major conference (6 letters with a : in the title) emailed me. They’d already emailed in previous weeks with various offers, but the two last minute emails I received undermined any interest they’d built up.
Because they were both addressed to ‘Steve’.
Now my name isn’t Steve. My middle name isn’t Steve. And even those people who have addressed an email to my blog have said ‘Dear TheWayoftheWeb’, which is fairly bland, but even they didn’t call me Steve.
So, just for the record, I’m not called ‘Steve’.