The idea has been circulating in the advertising/marketing world for decades. Develop a profile of your customer – or persona – to help inform your creative decision-making. And I’m a big advocate of using personas, having gotten to know Jill (a busy mom) and Barry (a successful executive) extremely well when writing for Best Buy’s customer-centricity initiative a few years ago.

Trouble is: a lot of people in our business aren’t using personas to their full potential. Which is why it was a real pleasure to listen to our June speaker, Tamara Adlin, founder and president of adlin, inc., and co-author of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (with John Pruitt, Microsoft).

On a warm evening at the Calhoun Beach Club, Tamara got right to the Achilles heel of most corporate organizations and the agencies who serve them. The market data we spend so much time and money to collect and analyze always seems to wind up underutilized, misunderstood, ignored and, ultimately, forgotten. There’s too big a gap between the data and the design.

She then explained how personas can help translate the data we have into a language we all speak and help us focus our efforts on the people who are important. Our customers.

To help illustrate the need for personas in the interactive marketing space, Tamara pointed out several common design problems that personas can help marketers and creative types avoid.

Barnacle based design
Bolting sitelets onto a website when new features or functionality are needed instead of modifying your actual website.

Corporate underpants
Website organization that reflects your corporate organization instead of your customers’ needs. Often has a tab for each cost center paying for the project.

“It has to be on the home page”
Putting everything onto your home page, making it cluttered and difficult to navigate. Often tries to bring the pet projects of the CEO and other stakeholders to the front.

Multiple personality disorder
Related to corporate underpants. When different cost centers or product lines develop sections of your site which leads to a bumpy end-to-end experience for site visitors.

“We need to use technology”
Happens when you try to adopt new technical capabilities faster than your customers are willing, interested or able to.

Focusing on a persona helps your site avoid these common missteps if it is developed by multiple teams with different roles and responsibilities. And here’s the kicker: even if the persona isn’t based on hard data, if it is defined with rigor and precision, all involved will be aligned and the end result will be more consistent. And therefore, more effective.

Tamara wrapped up her presentation by sharing ways you can use personas right now.
• Develop ad hoc personas
• Look for the typical site design issues
• Evaluate your site (or your competitors’ site) from the point of view of various personas
• Brainstorm features or messages based on personas
• Experiment with experience design

One final piece of advice from Tamara. Outlaw the term “user” when talking about the people who visit your website. It’s incredibly unspecific. Because like Tamara says: “There’s only one other industry that call its customers ‘users’ – and we don’t want to behave like it.”

For more of Tamara’s great insights on using personas, download the podcast of her presentation. In addition to her book, she recommends another authoritative publication on personas, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Coope

…And corporate marketers relinquish control.

You’ve heard about Brand Tags, haven’t you? (You’re nodding yes.) It’s the site where you — yes, you, the consumer — tag brands with the first thing that comes to your mind. Anyone can play. And the result is a “collective experiment in brand perception,” according to creator Noah Brier.

Brier released Brand Tags one month ago today, calling it “70% done.” Since then Brand Tags has over 940,000 tags and mentions on numerous blogs, including Seth Godin’s blog and Tom Weber’s Buzzwatch for the Wall Street Journal.

As Weber notes, “the free-for-all aspect of the Brand Tags approach may cause some corporate marketers to shudder.”

Here’s what the tag cloud for Target looks like. If you reorganize it in the “orderly view,” you’ll see that the first entry (at least of this post) is a gigantic “cheap.”

Ouch.

But “cheap” is quickly followed by some pretty terrific, titanic-sized adjectives, including “awesome,” “cool,” and “fun.” And true to Target’s branding, the tags “design,” “red,” and “bullseye” also appear as absolutely immense words. I’m thinking those tags would cause any corporate marketer to smile, rather than shudder.

It would appear, at least on Brand Tags, that Target has achieved a nice congruence between corporate marketing and consumer perception, an enviable position indeed.

Not all the tags you’ll find on the site are nice. Or polite. But as we heard at the most recent MIMA event, “Dual Reality: Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise,” which featured panelists from Target, Best Buy, General Mills, and Fingerhut, most marketers believe it’s okay for customers to talk about them online. And even better to listen. In her wrap-up post about the event, “Social Media: Leave Your Leisure Suit Behind,” Erica Butler writes, “It’s less about what we (branders) want to say, and more about what our customers want to tell us.” Brand Tags is certainly telling. In some cases shouting.

Let’s take a quick look at two other brands represented at the MIMA event, and what consumers are saying:

Best Buy. As of this post, the top entry is “electronics,” followed by “cheap,” and “overpriced.” Interesting tug of war here.

General Mills. Hmmm. Not currently on Brand Tags. (Anyone care to submit it? Jim Cuene, what do you say?) Several noted General Mills brands are not on the site either, including Betty Crocker, Bisquick, Pillsbury, Cheerios, or Haagen-Dazs. You will, however, find Green Giant and Old ElPaso, although the latter has not received many tags.

What about other big brands here in Minnesota? What are people saying? 3M, Dairy Queen, Thomson Reuters.

And MIMA? I thought about submitting a request to have it appear on Brand Tags, but since it’s a regional brand, I was concerned we might appear, well, like this.

Should I care?

(Hat tip to Todd Nesser, my colleague at Larsen, for first pointing me to Brand Tags.)