My WIRED Cover

About three months ago, I ripped the shrink wrap off my monthly WIRED mag­a­zine and found a note from the pub­lisher. They were doing a spe­cial run in part­ner­ship with XEROX around a piece on hyper-personalization on the web. If I was one of the first 5,000, the note said, to send in a pic­ture of myself at the appro­pri­ate res­o­lu­tion, I’d get my face on the cover of the mag­a­zine. Of course, I’ve always wanted to see my face on the cover of WIRED mag­a­zine.

So, I shot off the first pic that came up — a scruffy-looking, vaca­tion­ing Pete shot through a mir­ror in a get-away hacienda in New Mex­ico this year. Very vacation-chiq. Still, my face, my WIRED.

I think it’s a befit­ting exam­ple of the kind of per­son­al­iza­tion we’re capa­ble of now, that even a pub­li­ca­tion the size of WIRED can reach out and touch us read­ers so per­son­ally, and it’s some­thing all small busi­nesses can take a note on: how many of us have 5,000 indi­vid­ual clients in our ros­ters? How long would it take to reach out and touch them each so personally?