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Monthly Archives: June 2009

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Personas & User Dimentions For Marketing

June 29, 2009 – 1:24 PM

Personas and user dimension scales have been becoming increasingly popular with designers since 1999 when Alan Cooper popularized them in his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Today, they are extending their influence into the realm of marketing, which makes perfect sense because marketers should enable communication between design teams and the user community. To this end, I’ll share what I’ve learned about creating personas and user dimension scales.

Personas

Personas are fictitious characters, or archetypes, that represent user types that might use a product or service. These are useful as design targets, meaning they serve as a means to considering how different personas might respond differently to a particular design. Ideally personas are based on research, they are not just invented based on anecdotal experience with your users.

Personas are useful not only to infer how users might respond to features or experiences, but also to help validate design concepts. Obviously, this will not replace actual testing with real users, but it might help head off issues before you get there. Another key benefit of personas is that they enable designers to have empathy with potential users because they feel like real people.

Here’s a personas overview diagram to keep on hand while your creating them:

personas

Personas are not without their critics. Some people feel that they’re not scientific enough to represent your audience and can therefore be misleading. I don’t disagree with this, but I think the real value in creating them stems from the process of thinking deeply about how users react differently to products and services. Another potential issue to watch out for is letting the personas get in the way of user engagement. In other words, creating personas does not mean that you can stop engaging with users. Personas are a moving target that must be updated regularly  through engagement. For those interested in learning more about this, and some research that has been done on the effectiveness of personas, visit Frank Long’s research paper.

User Dimension Scales

Personas are useful to understand your user community. User dimension scales are a way of plotting your personas across a variety of user dimensions. As you can see in the diagram below, there are five dimensions listed with three personas listed on each dimension. Going through this exercise can help highlight where personas are similar or different.

dimentions

I hope this comes in handy and please comment if I’ve missed anything important.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Design, Marketing | Comments (1)

Twitter Digest

June 27, 2009 – 11:55 AM

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This week in the Twitterverse:

  • UNDERSTAND/FIX THE WORLD
    • NY Times: Zuckerburg says something interesting about privacy and Moore’s Law
  • MARKETING
    • MarketingVox: AdSense goes mobile
    • Influential Marketing Blog: Virgin + Google = a day in the clouds
  • DESIGN
    • Tech Crunch: Tonchidot gives an amusing presentation on the future of mobile tags
    • Hobnox: a cool audio tool that I don’t know how to use yet
    • Wired: I’ll be damned if Bing didn’t completely rip off Kayak, such is the web?
    • Identity Forum: naming our logos
  • SOME FUN
    • Wikiality: what happens when what we create becomes reality
    • Wired: and porn comes to the iPhone
    • Wonderful speech by John Hodgman with Obama on whether or not he is a nerd

Have a great weekend.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Culture, Twitter | Comments (0)

Tech Bloggers On Social Media
Event Follow Up

June 26, 2009 – 3:43 PM

First off, thanks to everyone who made it out to the SFAMA event last night at Adaptive Path. We had a great turn out for our panelists Robert Scoble of Rackspace/Building 43, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester , Kevin Marks of Google and Mark Silva of Real Branding.

The conversation was wide ranging, but there were a couple of things that jumped out for me. I’ll highlight those quickly below:

Wikiality

As social media changes marketing and the web experience in general, there are still some social phenomena that we just can’t kick. Namely, it’s still possible to use the media to perpetuate falsehoods through repetition. Here’s a funny site that coins the term Wikiality. In other words, just because we can talk back and start conversations does not mean we’re heading to a more accurate representation of reality.

Listening ≠ Innovation

Jeremiah commented that using social media to listen to communities can be misleading because they’re basing their input on past experience rather than what’s next. To make things worse, listening to social media quickly turns into listening to those with the loudest voices rather than those with the best ideas and can become a popularity contest.I think he’s put his finger on a real challenge for social media moving forward. How can social media be applied to strike a balance between community voice, business interest, and innovation?

This get’s back to the Henry Ford’s famous quote, ““If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” That said, I think it can be, and is being, done by companies like Proctor and Gamble who have developed a user-research program that addresses these concerns through the use of ethnography and other research methodologies in combination with social media.

Stop Asking For “Viral” Campaigns

Kevin made a great comment about how the term “viral” is a very poor choice to describe marketing campaigns. While it’s true that not all viruses cause disease, they are generally associated with doing so. Thus, Kevin proposed thinking about other biological metaphors to describe what we’re trying to do. For example, he suggested the metaphor of a seed within a tasty fruit. We carry the fruit with us so that we can eat it on our journeys and then transplant the seed elsewhere, by discarding it, thus spreading the population of the fruit in question. The metaphore that resonates best with me is that of the meme (which I talk about in this post)

Filtering Content With Profiles

Robert introduced the issue of filtering the content we consume through our network, rather than by using metrics. Kevin added fuel to this fire by talking about the way Technorati enables this. That said, I wonder if a hybrid approach won’t provide the best solution. Metrics are good for some kinds of filtering and not others. There are some companies out there, like the folks at RiseSmart, that are trying to combine people with algorithms to provide more relevant search.

The Top 100 Are Always Changing

Kevin brought up a good point that makes perfect sense, but that I’d never really thought about before. He said that the top 100 bloggers on Technorati are always changing, thus drawing attention to the fact that there is some consistent rate of change, or flow, between the long tail and the head. In other words, it’s not like those people at the top will be there forever. Though, I’m not sure I’ve really wrapped my head around what the effect of this really is. Perhaps it just prevents the consolidation of power?

Evolution Of Social Media

Several panelists talked about the evolution of social media and the fact that some of the original top bloggers are moving towards lifestreaming, Robert being one example. One effect of this is that we’re uploading more content than before. Kevin pointed out that the social media expereince may involve more uploading that downloading. My concern is that more content leads to more noise, which leads to more filtering, which may ultimately lead to more frustration unless filtering can keep up. We’ve seen this happen with the traditional broadcast approach to media where brands cranked up their megaphones so loudly that we can’t hear anything and we’ve lost a sense of trust. I hope that’s not where we’re headed.

Brands Need To Act Like People

Amen. Mark talked about this and I think pretty much everyone agrees that brands need act more like people. That doesn’t necessarily mean more transparency, but it does mean interacting in a human way. On the flip side, perhaps companies need to be held accountable in a more human way for their actions.

Another Summary

Louis Gray also did a nice live summary of the event.

Thanks for reading!

By Roland Smart | Posted in Culture, Marketing | Comments (0)

Writing A Request For Information (RFI)

June 23, 2009 – 9:42 PM

Over the years, I’ve helped several companies identify partners for a variety of projects from manufacturing to creative services and I’ve managed many of those partners and service providers after they were selected. This post is based on that experience, and is intended to share some of what I’ve learned about the request for information (RFI) process.

I’ll discuss the RFI process in relation to a recent project I did with a Bay Area scientific device company, Wafergen Biosciences, for the development of their new SmartChip system. In my role, I worked closely with the project lead to identify a service provider who could take on an industrial and user-interface design challenge associated with the project.

Why do an RFI?

The RFI process has two goals, the first of which is to educate yourself, and your company, so you can make a strategic decision about partners and service providers. Certainly, there are times when you’ll already have solid candidates for a project in your network but even in this case, the RFI process can help you understand key points of negotiation, estimate fair pricing thresholds, learn about market trends, and understand contemporary capability sets.

The second goal is to make sure you get the right information from your potential partners and service providers. Often, these companies will have a wide range of services , which means that a general capabilities presentation won’t give you insight into the practice area you’re interested in. I’ve also found that the RFI process can help help support internal alignment around project goals, which in turn results in a more highly developed request for proposals (RFP) …. I’ll write another post about RFP’s soon.

In Wafergen’s case, we needed a firm that could handle both an industrial design and a user-interface design project. This significantly narrows the field, because many firms specialize in one area only. Which brings me to the topic of to find candidates to particiate in your RFI.

An RFI for your RFI?

The projects I’ve worked on have been primarily for private companies, so I’ve never had the requirement of publicly posting an RFI. Assuming this is not the case, you’ll want to make the RFI process as lightweight as possible. Thus, it’s important to start with some research on your own to find firms to participate in the process. In my case, the scope of my engagement with Wafergen would only allow me to consider 10 firms in the RFI phase.

I took a hybrid approach to identifying the firms to participate. First, I reached out to my personal network through e-mail and LinkedIn. I then reached out to the internal team at Wafergen. Finally, I used Core77’s Design Directory to turn up some additional candidates. At this point, I’d probably looked at 30 websites, which I narrowed down to ten with the help of the Wfergen project lead.

3 key points:

  • Make sure you get a variety of firms to support a wider understanding of the field while allowing key points of differentiation to rise to the surface.
  • Don’t limit yourself to firms that you already know (that’s nepotistic and lazy).
  • Spend some time looking online to see what people say about candidates, rather than just looking at their websites.

A basic RFI outline

The structure of an RFI will vary a bit depending on the application, but here’s a general structure to get you started:

  • A Statement of Purpose – why are you looking for help? (clearly stated goals)
  • Response Guidelines
    • when do you want a response? (participation criteria)
    • in what format? (it may help to explain how the proposal will be reviewed)
    • and, to whom? (contact information)
  • General Questions
    • what are the key points around which you’ll make a decision? For example, firm size, number of locations, range of services, business history, portfolio samples, case studies, etc (make sure that your questions will actually have an impact on your decision).
    • request specific capability information related to your project (deliverable formats, software required, etc)
    • provide an area for candidates to include some information that may not be directly within the scope of the RFI but which they think is relevant.
  • Process
    • clearly state how your selection process will proceed.
    • identify how many firms will move onto the RFP process.
    • provide a contact should the candidate have additional questions about the process.
  • Fine Print
    • if your RFI requires that you disclose sensitive information, make sure to get an non-disclosure agreement (NDA) signed before sending the RFI.

3 things to look out for

  • The way that candidates respond to the RFI is usually indicative of their overall performance. Thus, if they’re too busy to be bothered, send you a canned response, or don’t respond on deadline proceed with caution. For example, In my Wafergen research I came across a firm whose answering service had no option for talking with an account manager, office manager, or salesperson. Ultimately, I had to leave a message with the accounting department to get someone to call me back!
  • Watch out for candidates that don’t disclose partnerships that they may require to meet your project requirements.
  • Be careful about having prolonged conversations with candidates, as this may give them an unfair advantage in the process. The idea is to give them enough information in the RFI to reply with what you’ll need to move to the next step.

3 project management tips

  • Start a spreadsheet with all the candidates listed as you’re working your way through the process. It’s too easy to confuse candidates, contacts, and assets otherwise. For the Wafergen project, I used Google Docs to manage the process because I wanted the project team to be able to watch the process unfold, review candidates, and provide feedback.
  • The way you handle the RFI process also sends a message to the candidate, so be professional, courteous, and respectful of the fact that they’re investing in the process at this point without getting paid. At the end of the process this means following up with the candidates that won’t be included in the RFP process.
  • Start writing your RFP as you go through the RFI process. This will allow you to incorporate what you learn into the RFP while preparing you to smoothly move forward with the approved candidates.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Marketing | Comments (6)

Twitter Digest

June 20, 2009 – 10:47 AM

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This week in the Twitterverse:

  • UNDERSTAND/FIX THE WORLD
    • The Wall Street Journal: Safeway has a new approach to healthcare
    • English, do you write it?
    • Wallpaper: Robbi Cooper flips the camera on porn
  • MARKETING
    • NY Times; Good article about marketing speak
    • You knew it was only a matter of time before “paypertweet” companies got started. Some people never learn.
  • DESIGN
    • A brilliant wedding invitation
    • Hugh MacLead: Drawing business problems and other funny stuff
  • SOME FUN
    • If you love sticky notes you’re going to LOVE this
    • Great Design Mind piece about construction cones
    • Food vendors in San Francisco should be interested in these inventive carts

Have a great weekend.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Twitter | Comments (0)

Gaurdian Crowdsources Audit Of MP Expenses

June 18, 2009 – 3:04 PM

This is just brilliant, suddenly big brother is looking over his shoulder because the barbarians are at the gate. Today the Guardian news service made thousands of expense documents available for review by readers like you and me.

Crowdsourcing Meet Accountability,

Accountability Meet Crowdsourcing.

Some MPs seem to have been squandering money that doesn’t belong to them. The challenge is that it would take huge amounts of time for a journalist to sort through all the documents to review who spent how much and on what. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack. Enter the crowd, care of the Gaurdian’s web based review tool. Here’s what they say on their site:Guardian tool

We hope that many hands can make light work of the thousands of documents released by Parliament in relation to MPs’ expenses. We, and others – perhaps you? – are using these tools to review each document, decide whether it contains interesting information, and extract the key facts.

Some pages will be covering letters, or claim forms for office stationery. But somewhere in here is the receipt for a duck island. And who knows what else may turn up. If you find something which you think needs further attention, simply hit the button marked “investigate this!” and we’ll take a closer look.

It’s really about helping journalists focus their energies on the right documents. Here’s how far they’ve made it as of this post:
progress bar

Apparently taxpayers are engaged … or should I say enraged? Besides the fact that people are voyeurs when it comes to public figures, people get rather touchy when it comes to how their money gets spent. I think this is a great example of how we can use crowdsourcing to improve the world.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Culture | Comments (0)

Product Marketing: Bullets Speak Louder Than Words

June 17, 2009 – 11:11 AM

How are you using your own products to establish credibility?

Most people call it walking the talk. However your express it, one way companies establish credibility is by showing that they believe in their products enough to use them themselves. In fact, one of the problems that many companies have is that they know much more about how to make their products than they do about how they work in the real world.

Below, you’ll find a short video of Richard Davis founder of Second Chance. Richard goes to extremes to establish credibility for his company and the bullet-proof vests they manufacture. Do not try this at home:

Using bullets to establish credibility has been bubbling up in popular culture for some time. Perhaps you’ll recall Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass stunt with which he proved he was the biggest jackass of them all:

Before either of the above two examples, there was an artist named Chris Burden who created an art piece in which a friend shot him in the arm …. he was not wearing a vest, nor was he shot with a bean bag. Chris stepped up the plate for a real bullet in the arm. The piece is called SHOOT:

Now just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you should use bullets to establish your credibility. But, if these folks are willing to take a bullet for what they believe in, you should be able to make a serious commitment. If you’re a marketer, you should be using your own products and sharing stories about the experience. If you’re working with products that you don’t have a need for (let’s say you make pill bottles, but don’t have to take any medication) you should still use them to hold gum, toothpicks, usb drives, or something. Get every employee to use them for a week and tell that story!

I’ve talked about how many of the best marketing ideas come out of the arts, it’s because you’ve got to get creative. I’d love to hear stories about how you’ve been using your own product to establish credibility.

By Roland Smart | Posted in Culture, Marketing | Comments (0)

SFAMA Event:
Tech Bloggers & Marketing 2.0 @ Adaptive Path

June 16, 2009 – 7:11 PM

On Thursday, June 25, I’ll be hosting an event for the San Francisco chapter of the American Marketing Association at Adaptive Path and you’re invited! CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

How Tech Bloggers are Leading the Marketing 2.0 Revolution

WHO: Our panalists include: Robert Scoble of Rackspace/Building 43, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester , Kevin Marks of Google and Mark Silva of Real Branding.

WHAT: At this event our panelists will discuss their experience as/with technology bloggers who have driven the growth and evolution of social media. They’ll debate how social media is evolving, it’s implications for business, and whether or note they’ve been focused enough on business applications. It should be a lively evening for those interested in:

  • A framework for approaching social media as a business driver
  • Success stories of small businesses
  • Specific tactics for driving local search optimization

WHEN: On Thursday, June 25. 6:00 – 7:00 Registration and Networking, 7:00 – 8:00 Program with Q&A.

    WHERE: Adaptive Path: 363 Brannan St.  San Francisco, CA

    COST
    $15 members; $25 non-members $10 student-members; $15 student-non-members

    I hope to see you there.

    By Roland Smart | Posted in Marketing | Comments (0)

    Twitter Digest

    June 12, 2009 – 2:12 PM

    twitterheader2

    This week in the Twitterverse:

    • UNDERSTAND/FIX THE WORLD
      • BusinessWeek: How cloud computing will change business
      • Online Journalism Blog: Making money from 21st century journalism
    • MARKETING
      • Upcoming Event in SF: Tech Bloggers & Marketing 2.0 – I’ll be hosting this @ Adaptive Path
      • AD AGE: The Facebook vanity URL land grab
      • Ogilvy white papers on marketing in a recession (with lead gen sign up)
    • DESIGN
      • The USPS has a brilliant new way to determine if your package will fit in the box
    • SOME FUN
      • A perspective window by Adelbert Ames that just messes with your head

    Have a great weekend.

    By Roland Smart | Posted in Twitter | Comments (0)

    Homeless Cigarettes:
    A Story Of Marketing Convenient Avoidance

    June 10, 2009 – 10:24 AM

    The other night I was drinking with a friend at a local bar, when I saw something that made me laugh because it was a clever example of a marketing tactic designed to fit perfectly into an existing behavioral pattern. I’m calling it the homeless cigarette service.

    Quick Background

    In the US, it’s illegal to sell cigarettes individually or in packs of less than 20. As an aside, I’ve read of some research that shows you can affect consumption rates simply by altering the number of cigarettes in a pack, or by selling them individually.

    Social Smokers Want Cigarettes But Don’t Want To Buy Them

    Smoking is prohibited inside bars in California so people who smoke stand in front to enjoy cigarettes. Following this, social smokers gravitate to the same area to “bum” cigarettes off the smokers who actually buy them. One consequence of this is that there is often an awkward moment when the social smoker comes outside and scans the sidewalk for a prospective donor.

    The Opportunity Space

    That awkward moment holds promise for the right service. In this case, a homeless man was sitting in front of the bar smoking and waiting for social smokers to come out. When they did, he’d simply offer them a cigarette for free. There would often already be someone smoking next to him who he’d given a cigarette.

    Of course, you can imagine where this is going. Most of the people to whom he gave a cigarette ended up giving him a dollar before they went back into the bar. And because there was a steady stream of participants there was an established practice of giving him a dollar on the way back in.

    Some Quick Math

    I’m using some round numbers here, but you’ll get the idea. If the man pays $5 for the pack of cigarettes and gives away 15 out of the twenty in the pack and receives $15 in donations during this process, then he’s showing $10 of gross profit per pack. Or to put it another way, each cigarette costs a quarter which means that he’s got 66.6% gross margin. Now if he can go through a pack every hour for a period of four hours, then he’ll make $160 a night. Let’s assume he does this only on the three most popular nights, in which case he’ll make $480 a week, $1920 a month, or $23,040 a year. While this business is clearly not scalable, it seems like a pretty good gig if you’ve got zero overhead. And, if you consider that he could purchase cigarettes much more cheaply in bulk, and that he could work more nights a week, things start looking pretty rosy.

    A Bit Of Psychology

    Part of what I find fascinating about all this is the fact that the service is not just about distributing cigarettes to a specific community. The homeless man was successful because he was serving a psychological need. Consider the fact that many social smokers experience a feeling of guilt around even having a cigarette because many social smokers are really lapsed former smokers. Additionally, there may be some guilt around asking friends or strangers for something for free.

    The unique conceit of the homeless cigarette service model is that it’s possible to satisfy those feelings of guilt by making a donation at the end of the experience. Further, there’s a sense of relief knowing that there is an established guilt free social order, or behavior, around the practice.. Finally, participants are giving money to a homeless person, which may make them feel good in and of itself. Conversely, for those people who are wary of giving money to homeless people, because they don’t think it’s an effective way of changing the system that drives homelessness, there’s a sense of permission because they’re receiving a service.

    By Roland Smart | Posted in Culture, Marketing | Comments (1)
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