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

Today I spammed everyone on my AIM contact list with an invitation to join Facebook. I was searching for co-workers on the social network, trying to understand the more useful apps and plugins available to the average user, when I inadvertently clicked yes and authorized Facebook to contact everyone on my buddy list. I was distracted. I was multitasking. I was not as careful as I should have been. And, with one click, I was totally humiliated. My heart stopped for what seemed like an entire minute while I prayed for a confirmation screen that never came. I had misread a question, given my permission, and there was no going back. I just sat there and wondered how I’d explain to my colleagues, friends, peers, and, of course, the random total strangers I’d added to my list along the way, that I was a complete idiot who’d let Facebook hijack my buddy list to solicit memberships. I was one more unsuspecting pawn in the Facebook battle for world domination.

There is value in centralizing data. So many of us are out devouring and contributing to content-rich websites and social networks, connecting with long-lost friends, classmates, colleagues. We’re finally in a position to leverage ‘who we know’. Because, what have we always heard? It’s not what you know, but who. And the who has never been more accessible. We’re separated by miles and years and jobs, but we’re just a click away thanks to networks like Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn. There are new social and professional network sites trying to get in on the action every day. Today alone I had two colleagues try to get me to join Plaxo Pulse. I couldn’t help but wonder if they even knew they’d asked me to join. Recently a friend’s contact list had been hijacked by Spock (I refuse to link to this evil entity) to invite 2500 of his closest friends to join him there. I felt better about my 125 AIM messages when I compared it to 2500. But the sting was still there.

As more and more of these networks fight for our information, who’s going to prove the front runner? Clearly he (or she) who owns the most data wins. And Facebook’s shift from social network to ‘platform’ seems to suggest they believe they can connect all of this decentralized data floating around on the web and make it accessible via their single, simple, interface. So while the data might be scattered amongst iTunes, flickr, Amazon, AIM and other lesser known entities, a series of simple web applications can integrate all of it into the Facebook platform. What’s more, Facebook turns it around and provides an aggregate snapshot of your contacts’ data. It’s really a win-win. Or is it?

Recently Facebook has taken some heat for invasive marketing tactics via it’s Beacon system. Beacon takes data from external websites and makes it available to your contact list with the intention of promoting product through passive endorsements. If you bought something on Amazon, and you’re my friend, the thinking is I might be interested in that product as well. Because you, my friend, are just so darn influential in my life. The problem with this theory is you might be my friend, but I might not want you to know I just bought zit cream from my favorite zit cream website. Its an invasion of privacy and Facebook is still working that one out. Beyond that though, Facebook is starting to look like the Borg. Resistance is clearly futile. If you want to be in touch with anyone in this 21st century the easiest and most practical way to do it is through the web/Facebook, and peer pressure is unavoidable. Come on, everybody’s doing it. There’s a suggestion of youthful trendiness that we all fall victim to. Once you make the leap, though, you’ve sold your soul to the internet’s equivalent of the devil. Because once you create that profile, there’s (allegedly) no getting that data back. You can’t quit Facebook. Not really, anyway.

What does it all mean? To those of us working in technology? And those of us consuming it? These are tough questions to answer. But it seems clear that one of the most valuable assets of our time is our data. Our information. Yet, in spite of that reality, our data is clouded by a mix of fear (identity theft) and ignorance (my dog’s name is my password!).

What’s our responsibility as creators of content, and websites and systems and as participants of networks? What is our contribution? How can we influence how all of this unfolds? I believe that how we interact with, and collect data from users, needs to reflect truth and authenticity. Sure, we publish privacy statements and terms of use policies. We won’t store data or we won’t sell it or give it away or use it without permission. But it’s more than that. We need to help users understand what it is they’re providing and how easy it is to exploit. We need to give them an opportunity to change their minds, or confirm their understanding of an interaction. In my case for instance, a simple ‘confirmation’ page would have saved me the embarrassment of having to apologize to 125 friends and colleagues for that unwanted IM spam. Facebook knew exactly what it was doing when it required only a single click to access my list. I think it’s a cheap tactic in the race for the most data. The downside is, I’m no longer as enthusiastic about the value of Facebook as a networking tool. I see it as suspect now. The upside is I’ll be more careful when I use little web apps like that.

But our standards for collecting this data aren’t set in stone. We’ve only just begun, so what more can we do to extend real value for the user, and tap into the thing that’s most valuable to our clients? We can consider a user’s understanding of their valuable points of data as part of our commitment to simple, usable web experiences. We should see how we collect data as part of usability. We should only collect what is absolutely critical to the experience and we should make certain the user understands the cost of sharing their data and the return on their investment of trust. Finally, we need to keep our promises. Sharing data should have some reward for the user, in terms of access to content, or connections or something of value. We should treat our user’s data as sacred. If we expect to foster a long-term customer relationship, we need to respect what we know about a user and what we continue to discover. It’s common sense, really. Any of us, even presumed ‘experts’ can fall victim to guerilla data collection tactics. It’s embarrassing. It’s painful. It’s avoidable. The difference, though, is we have the ability to influence change. We have the option of applying some code of conduct to how websites interact with users. We’re not done. We’ve only just begun. Facebook doesn’t get to decide. We do.

Got a camera? (You’re nodding yes.) Planning to vote? (Of course you are.)

Participate in the Polling Place Photo Project, a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism, sponsored by The New York Times, AIGA, and Design Observer.

All you have to do is look through your lens and document democracy. Simply capture your local voting experience (abiding, of course, by state and local laws), post your photos, and become part of this nationwide, non-partisan project. The goal is to capture primaries, caucuses, and the general election from the people’s point of view.

Here’s how to participate. And here are some recent photos from the Super Tuesday Minnesota caucuses:

Minneapolis
“Democratic caucus line”
Photograph by Lewis Weinberg

“The convener shouts out directions”
Photograph by Pat Carney

Saint Paul
“Caucus chaos”
Photograph by Heidi Sandstad

“Post-caucus quiet”
Photograph by Arah Bahn

How about it MIMA members? Capture your user experience. Look through your viewfinder. Point and shoot. This is everything you applaud in a open-source initiative — photographs of the people, by the people, for the people.

I just returned from the Adaptive Path sponsored and coordinated MXSF 2007 conference in San Francisco. This was their first “MX” meeting, and it was well attended (it sold out!). There was a very large number of attendees from Minnesota. That was actually freaking a few people out, like we were going to take it over. I crossed paths with Mark Buccella of bswing and Bill from Room and Board (sorry Bill, forgot your last name and I didn’t get your card…). There were also like twenty people there from Adobe.

Anyway, Adaptive Path is Jesse James Garret’s firm in San Francisco, and you may remember JJG as one of the earliest advocates for “user experience” or UX, he wrote a book about it back in 2002. The M in MX is for “managing for the user experience” and the conference was aimed at a multidisciplinary audience of both agency and client individuals who are charged with creating/managing/improving user experience within their work, projects and teams. The bulk of the presenters seemed to be very product design focused, which was ok as there is decent overlap, but I personally would have liked to see more focus on both interactive and service oriented user experience strategies. Adaptive Path blogged the event and has some killer summaries. They are also going to be posting podcasts of each presenters piece. Check out the blog here, but I am going to inspire you first with some of my highlights from the conference:

Jesse James Garret

Jesse opened the conference with a really nice talk on what the whole experience thing is really about. He used the story of Kodak and the first consumer tech product (you click the button, we do the rest…) as a case study and dropped thought bombs on us like these:

- Biggest compliment that can be paid to what we create? I can’t live without it.

- Too many people are approaching problems through technology, others start with features. To be really successful, we need to solve problems by beginning with experience.

- The experience IS the product and business value + opportunity = experience strategy

Lou Carbone (our own local marketing strategy guru)

- CRM does not = relationship, it’s just data so get over it.

- Our goal, our objective should be to create value for our customers. Profit is only the reward for doing this well.

Caterina Fake (Flickr co-creator) interviewed by Peter Merholz

This was a pretty cool interview. Basically, Flickr was an accident. She and her team had been jamming on some online game called Game Neverending. They realized it was not going to scale the way they needed to, and in an act of desperation began re-purposing code and created Flickr. They were broke. They had no plan. They did no research. They had no idea, really, what they were going to end up with. None of them were even photographers, per se, but they were adept at creating social software and knew they were on to something with the idea of photo sharing. They benefited from an intense feedback loop, constant improvement and testing with real live people. Now, Flickr is owned by Yahoo, they’re all rich and have been on the cover of Newsweek. Dreams do come true for all you mom’s basement-working code geeks.

Overall, the conference was great. Really interesting mix to the audience, great conversation and networking, and the weather was nice. I had a killer dinner at Range in the Mission, too.

Welcome to the official blog for MIMA, the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association.

Here you will find updated news about MIMA, events, projects and activities as well as interactive marketing industry news. We welcome and encourage your readership and interaction.