Digital Marketing and Web Strategy by Bob Hazlett | One Half Amazing!

ThinkVitamin had a great comic this week on creating and understanding personas.  Personas are ficticious characters that are created to represent a larger segment or targeted demographic of customer that you’re trying to reach.  They are used to help guide decisions about a product, features or its overall design.

Personas are useful because they put a face on otherwise abstract data about your customers. By thinking about the needs of these fictional characters, you can better infer what a real person might need or want.

Additional Articles on Personas from The Cooper Journal

• The Original of Personas
• Putting Personas Under the Microscope

Louis Gray wrote a wonderful piece on what he believes are the keys to satisfying consumer expectations in today’s real-time world.  Gray believes consumers and technology are becoming more acute, hence they are demanding greater advancements in communication and openness with the companies they do business with.  In his post, he details 10 key tenants for dealing with today’s real-time consumer including, my favorites, #2 – We Expect the Product to Work on Any Platform In Any Location and #10 – We Want You To Trust Us As Informed Consumers and Partners. It’s worth the read, check Louis Gray’s rules for today’s consumers.

The world of communication and product delivery is changing as the Web evolves and new services are introduced, enabling us to gain faster access to information, download richer media more quickly, and rapidly voice our opinions and feedback near and far in a wide variety of methods, including text, voice, video and imagery. As customers become more savvy and in tune with these new tools, we are also expecting those offering products and services to adapt, and as such, I thought it made sense to put forth what I believe are key tenets of a new consumer manifesto for today’s real-time world.

Who do you feel are the best companies that are really in-tune with real-time consumer expectations? The worst? What will it take for more companies to tune in and take action?

Wow, who wouldn’t want to work for a company that valued and promoted company culture like Zappos.com?  Watch the video below and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Zappos Core Values

1. Deliver WOW through service
2. Embrace and drive change
3. Create fun and a little weirdness
4. Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded
5. Pursue growth and learning
6. Build open and honest relationships with communication
7. Build a positive team and family spirit
8. Do more with less
9. Be passionate and determined
10. Be humble

What core values are important to you in your work?  What values would you add if you could start a company tomorrow? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out the image below, its from Rhodes College.  While looking for some adult education classes I came across their form for a free class catalog.  The only (and big) thing wrong with it is that it requires a CAPTCHA to process your request.  The issue in this example is that the CAPTCHA image is broken, so the user will never be able to submit the form.

There are too many tools available today for this not to work.  Instead of playing the $350 for the class, I guess I’ll just find some videos on YouTube. Do you think Rhodes will notice?

I’ll make this quick. Overall, not the best experience in the world, but I didn’t go in expecting much.
• Got to store at 5:30AM, was about 20th in line.
• Apple Employees came around about 7:30 to show off new phone, offer juice and make sure you were eligible.
• Store had the capacity to handle about 10 or so people at a time.
• Apple employees have to put in all your info in on those little handheld devices. Whoever thought of that is a damn fool.
• Number successfully ported over at about 9am, but activation through iTunes hung. Employee said I was his 4th customer and 1st were he got all (most) the way through.
• Credit card handhelds in store crash about 9:10am.
• Wait, Wait, Wait on iTunes to activate – nothing
• 10am, they say we can go home and activate them through iTunes
• Line didn’t move for about an hour or more, people were getting restless outside. Employees at a loss about what to do. Head guy on the phone.
• iPhone still not officially hooked up to iTunes, but I am getting calls on it now.

ping me @onehalfamazing on Twitter if you have direct questions or concerns. I’ll do my best to get to them all.