I want to find a way to support audience segmentation in DNN. Whereas some of the high-end CMS solutions on the market natively support such forms of segmentation as topographical, behavorial, demographic and psychographic segmentation, DNN doesn't offer anything this robust. Yet, I've been trying to find a way to make it happen for some time. If DNN could do segmentation, it could compete with some of the multi-million dollar CMS solutions on the market and it's always painful for me to ask one of my clients to spend millions just to get this type of functionality.

I've developed a strategy that I believe will work but I think DNN is missing one small component to make it happen. Let me describe it and see if anything know of a way to make it work.

Let's say that my client is a bookseller like Amazon. Let's say that we want to implement a very simple segmentation solution based on 2 segments. First, we want to segment them topographically based on the types of books they like to read - say just fiction and non-fiction. Second, we want to segment them demographically based on gender. So, we only want to track 4 audience personas - women fiction readers, men fiction readers, women non-fiction readers and men non-fiction readers.

I could set up one security role group called AudienceGender and another AudienceBookGenre. Inder AudienceGender, I could set up 2 roles, Male and Femail. Under AudienceBookGenre, I could set up 2 roles, Fiction and Non-fiction.

Next, on my product listing page, I could set up 4 text modules each with an introductory paragraph that welcomes each of these 4 audience personas that are most appealing to women, men, fiction and non-fiction readers. Then, I would assign view permissions to each of these text modules to one of the these 4 security roles (plus a 5th that I would assign to anonymous users who haven't been assigned to one of these 4 roles that gives a generic message). Naturally, I would also do the same for displaying different images and color schemes based on gender and topographical interest (as well as a different product listing modules on this page for each audience persona).

The only thing I need to make this work is the ability to automatically place someone into a security role based on them clicking a link. For example, on the home page, I would offer some text and images and ask the user to self select which best persona segments best describes them. As soon as they click on one of these 4 links, I assign them into one of these 4 security roles and then immediately begin personalizing their site to their needs and interests and showing them only those products that best suit their needs. Obviously, when they chose one of the 4, we automatically remove the other 3 from their account so they can't see more than one audience segment's content.

So, my question is, does anyone know of a way to automatically assign security roles based on the behavior such as clicking a link?

Thanks, John