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Managing User Personas

MM: But you and I both invest with Schwab, for example. So when we go onto Schwab, they’ve got a lot of the most sensitive data about us already. So if there are offers they could make that speak to my role as an economic actor, I’d say, “Yes. Hey—good! Bring it on!”

BK: So that’s more about internal personalization rather than industry persona development. Right?

As a matter of fact we’ve discussed this very topic several times in my web analytics group in Atlanta. Companies are constantly trying to define a manageable set of personas that represent the majority of their site visitors so they can fine tune content creation, marketing campaigns, product or service offerings, etc.

MM: In that context, a persona would represent a facet of my social identity.

BK: It might. Or, it might speak to your behavioral trends specific to one company or organization.

MM: So what kind of trends have you seen in terms of developing these personas? For example, I just read that MySpace has now spent a tremendous amount of time and money developing what they call “micro-niches” — about 1,000 or so very specific interests that they’ve mined from the profiles on MySpace pages. They’re then able to offer very specific activity-based or identity-based groups to advertisers seeking to get into that group.

BK: This isn’t at all an area of expertise for me but organizations like MySpace will certainly have interest and resources to develop such micro-niches beyond what a typical business would have. In the web analytic SIG discussions mentioned previously, corporations seem to be struggling to keep these personas in a manageable – 6 to 12 – range rather than building out hundreds or thousands of micro-niches. To me the question is “what’s the value of sub-divided users to that level unless you have products or services that are so unique?”

In your example, MySpace is looking for more and more exclusive groups of subscribers that will appeal to a large and diverse audience of advertisers. This makes sense for them to have thousands of personas.

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