Content Strategy Portland Meetup’s Persona Discussion May 2013

The Content Strategy PDX Meetup is back in action, everyone.

It had been a while since the group got together. I think the last time was for the Ann Rockley event back in 2012.

Last night, the crew got together over at ISITE Design to talk about user personas. The discussion panel consisted of:

Here are our panelists!

From left to right:

  • Isaac Szymanczyk, Senior Communications Strategist at Nike
  • Ben Lloyd, President of Amplify Interactive
  • Katherine Gray, Content Strategist at Babcock+Jenkins
  • Robin Stevens, User Experience Lead at Experience Lab.
  • Bryan Finke, Global Marketing Strategist at Yesmail

The panelists discussed their definitions of personas and how they use them to inform design decisions from web development to brand work, internal to global communications. By the end of the session, and after extensive Q&A by the crowd, the persona definition sounded a little something like:

“A fictional person of a user group or segment defined by goals, expectations, psychographics, and humanizing characteristics. It’s a method to describe a target audience or group in order to inform key communication design decisions.”

Even though these personas aren’t real people, they represent our users and audiences, giving organizations an idea of whom they serve and wish to connect with. This is well worth the research dollars during the discovery phase of any communications or content-related project.

I personally recommend it to be a main part of any discovery/alignment phase of your content strategy methodology, if it isn’t already.

Memorable nuggets of truth from our panelists included:

Bryan Finke: Personas will often identify key objectives of a user group or segment, a point of view of that group, and grant a more contextual idea of the audience in order for communicators to design experiences to influence behavior or better connect.

Isaac Szymanczyk: Personas humanize user experience: they’re not people with pockets filled with money. It’s an exercise that allows communicators to learn much more about their audiences and what they aspire to be and do.

Robin Stevens: Persona research isn’t a push-button solution. It’s a part of a larger methodology to fully realize a communications solution. This methodology doesn’t have to be an expensive research session. You can DIY your way to success and insights.

Ben Lloyd: User personas will always be a moving target– it takes research and resources to continue to know who you’re trying to be in the shoes of.

Katherine Gray: There’s no wrong way to create a persona, as long as it’s assisting in better understanding a particular user group and informing effective communications solutions. A brand manager will see a user persona much differently than a user experience specialist.

Did you miss out? There’s more!

It was great to hear that the CSPDX crew has some more events for the quarter.

Up next is an event featuring Karen McGrane and her book, Content Strategy for Mobile, on May 23rd. You can snag a copy of her book over at A Book Apart. I know I’ll be reading my copy to get ready for that talk.

Hope to see you all there!

Some highlights from my time at InnoTech 2013

If you ever want a deep dive into information technology and telecommunications, InnoTech is a great place to start.

InnoTech 2013 marked the 10th year of the conference. Along with IT and telecom speakers, there’s also a bit of digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) as well. It’s a solid mix of topics from the tech and digital communication realms.

Penguins and Pandas, what?

Ben Lloyd of Amplify Interactive, Matthew Brown of SEOMoz, and Michael Cottam of Visual Iteneraries kicked off a session on demystifying Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.

Ben Lloyd, Matthew Brown, and Michael Cottam present their panel on SEO.

Ben’s commentary felt very resonant to some current web content challenges of mine:

  • Build your links like a human being by providing valuable information to your user throughout their experience with your site.
  • Another reminder that the get-rich-quick stuff that we see in our email spam folders is useless. These snake-oil organizations are getting “Penguin Slapped.” Don’t fall for it. Trust in your user research, content strategy, and your willingness to build great content and experiences.
  • Invest in community-building and content strategy if you want a great foothold in the recent SEO game. Fuel, nurture, and trust these professionals.

Whurley demystifies innovation, shows off magical skateboard and shopping cart.

Lunch was hosted by EasyStreet and featured William “Whurley” Hurley of Chaotic Moon Studios. Whurley inspired the crowd, explaining how innovation is a cultural thing, not some kind of magical button that new talent can bring to an organization. Innovation is an initiative that begins at the core of an organization. Do you respect it, or not?

Whurley showing the crowd a video about the mind-controlled skateboard.

He emphasized that innovation is simpler than most believe it to be. It’s taking common, available parts and using them in new ways to solve problems and challenges. To prove it, he showed videos of a mind-controlled skateboard and a smart-shopping grocery cart. These products captured the attention of its audiences, and even scientific authority.

How’d they pull it off? Open minds, search engine knowledge, and commercially available parts. Raw innovation right there.

If you want to quantify innovation, Whurley suggests less looking at the bottom line and more observing the frequency and gravity in which we suspend the beliefs of audiences through the use of our products and services.

A look at competitive intelligence and its potential benefits.

Marshall Kirkpatrick giving his competitive intelligence presentation at InnoTech 2013.

After some meeting and greeting with all kinds of vendors in the information technology and telecommunications industries, I tuned in to Marshall Kirkpatrick’s (Founder, LittleBird) presentation on competitive intelligence. Marshall’s talk described applications of competitive intelligence and how these tools give professionals and easier path towards accessing insights from data.

Marshall focused on three tangible values of competitive intelligence:

  • Saving time: Competitive intelligence tools are available to organizations of any size who want to leverage big data. Using these tools to quickly identify and deliver data to organizations saves immense amounts of time. Professionals can instead use this newly available time to do other operations.
  • Facilitating new discoveries: Data visualization techniques and tools allow us to take overwhelming amounts of information and distill them into actionable insights. These new discoveries often fuel new initiatives that lead to new data. This process continues to derive immense amounts of value for the organization, if you have a staff that has the skill sets to manage and analyze data to an organization’s benefit.
  • Accessing higher-order thinking: When organizations use competitive intelligence and data visualization tools to take “heavy lifting” off of their staff, these professionals spend less time understanding and remembering gobs of data and more time taking action with it. Marshall emphasizes that the goal is to get your staff into a mode of analysis, evaluation, and creation with data.

Overall, the event was a nice change of pace from the typical workweek. A quick hop onto the MAX to the convention center for some learning, beer, and solid conversation? No-brainer.

Big thanks to all of the speakers and vendors who made the event a great time. I’m looking forward to InnoTech 2014 for sure.

Some thoughts about Word Up!

In a world of SaaS and online sass, we’re all on a mission to be first to tweet report, to optimize, to A/B test. Publishing speed, iterative processes, and character limits dominate our thoughts as we craft language and wordsmith.

Word Up! is available on Amazon. Go check it out!

In Word Up!, Marcia Riefer Johnston reminds us that we can still play with language and that we can access word-crafting ingenuity and flexibility, even in this urgent world. She emphasizes empowering ourselves with language uncontrolled by rigid I/O rules of the digital tools that we use.

The chapters of Word Up! read at a blog-like cadence. Rich nuggets of writing wisdom are encased in stories and anecdotes. Some stories are reminders of key writing rules that we may have forgotten. Some are nudges to play and explore, to own language.

Word Up! enchants as much as it taps you on the shoulder to remind you of ways to supercharge writing, and to harness control of our always-on-the-move English language.

Whether you write for a living, or live to write, this is a book worth your time. Check her blog out, too.