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

Creating and Understanding Personas is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

I’m still a firm believer in developing a relationship and providing value to your user base FIRST, but once that’s accomplished and you’re ready to take your messaging to the next level here is some food for thought from web usability extraordinaire, Jakob Nielsen, on optimizing and beefing up your tweets. My synopsis:

• Readers only scan the first few words of a tweet, make them count.
• Use a URL shortner, but help give the user an idea of what they’re clicking to.  ShortURL.com/SEOStrategy is better than ShortURL.com/x6L9Mn
• Messages on twitter (and facebook, etc) are time sensitive.  Time your messages to reach your audience at the appropriate time they would likely read it and take action.  Once your message is off screen, its essentially dead.  Twitter time is 10x faster than email time.
• Answer “Why should they care?”

Twitter Postings: Iterative Design (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

Giving Your Twitter Messages More Punch and Credibility – Tips from Jakob Nielsen is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!