Developing user personas for your website will help you design a website or social campaign that resonates with visitors, encourages content sharing and makes content useful for your target audience. User personas are essentially fictitious characters that represent the various different types of people that visit your website. These representations should be based on qualitative and some quantitative user research and web analytics
Benefits Of Personas
Personas help to focus decisions surrounding site components by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the conversation. They make it easier to prioritize features and particular content by determining what the most important goal of your site is.
By mapping user goal they can help build a developed and useful Information Architecture for your site. The design and overall look of your site should be targeted to enhance your user’s experience. The copy must be written to the appropriate audiences. Overall, personas allow you to create a personalized and more engaging experience of your website or social content.
Best Practices For Developing Personas
Personas development belongs at the beginning of the project, as personas can inform site functionality, help uncover gaps, or highlight new opportunities. You may develop one or more personas for a project but limit yourself to the main audiences for the site.
The goal of personas is not represent all audiences or address all needs of the website but instead to focus on the major needs of the most important user groups.
Elements of A Persona
Personas generally include the following key pieces of information:
Persona Group (i.e. Supporter)
Fictional name
Job titles and major responsibilities
Demographics such as age, education, ethnicity and family status
The goals and tasks they are trying to complete using the site
Their physical, social and technological environment
A quote that sums up what matters most to the persona as it relates to your site
Casual pictures representing that user group
Cancer Research UK
At Cancer Research UK, we have a variety of personas and each agile scrum works to fulfill the needs of these users. Because the content on the Cancer Research UK site can be varied from supporters looking to enter Race for Life, to patients looking for early diagnosis information, it makes it ever more important that we target our content towards our users.
The benefits of targeting users means that user goals are aligned with business goals and because this is mapped at the beginning of projects it aims to devalue unnecessary content and make web pages the most useful they can be.
A key part of checking whether your content is matching your user goals is to carry out User Acceptance Testing. At Cancer Research UK, we regularly use UAT to watch our targeted persona complete basic goals in a comfortable, usability lab. If the majority of those tested can find what they need from the content then you know you are heading in the right direction.
Agile development is one of the big buzzwords of the digital industry but what exactly does it mean? Put simply, agile development is a way of managing teams and projects in order to deliver work in an efficient way.
Agile Manifesto
The use of the word agile in this context derives from the agile manifesto, a better way to manage development projects. Here are 4 important values of agile:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Cancer Research UK
At Cancer Research UK, we have adopted agile. The #nomakeupselfie all started with a simple spot-on social media. The success of this user-driven campaign was mainly down to the proactive nature of our social media team but, with the digital team working in agile, it allowed the flexibility to de-prioritize other projects.
We couldn’t have been any more thrilled than we already were to gain £2 million for our charity with #nomakeupselfie.
Benefits Of Using Agile Development
Agile way of working aims to deliver user centric projects. The team must be empowered to make decisions so that work is delivered in a realistic time period.
A key principle, is that testing is integrated throughout the project lifecycle and iteration happens at each step in the process.
Agile allows a collaborative approach between all stakeholders; everyone is involved and happy with the result.
Roles in Agile Development
Although agile development is all about a collaborative approach there are key roles that help agile work:
Scrum Team: This is the team that deliver the product.
Product Owner: The person who will be responsible for prioritising work on the product. A person who knows what is required of the product, someone who is a good communicator and able to convey requirements. Most importantly, a person who is committed to the success of the product, such that they are willing and able to dedicated a reasonable amount of time to its development.
Scrum Master: As Scrum Master, you are responsible for supporting the Scrum Team, coaching and guiding them through this process, and removing any impediments blocking their progress.
6 Steps To Introduce Agility
Step 1: Get Your Backlog In Order
The Product Backlog, in its simplest form, is a list of things that people want to be done to the product, in priority order.
Step 2: How To Estimate Your Product Backlog
You need to provide some high-level initial estimates, in order to get an idea of the size of your product backlog items. This is helpful because it helps to inform the decision about priorities. Whether or not the features are likely to be worthwhile. And from a management point of view, gives a perspective of how big the team ought to be.
Step 3: Sprint Planning
Call a Sprint Planning meeting. Make sure the meeting is attended by the whole team. Clarify the requirements of your sprint eg In these 2 weeks to go live with a website so that we can implement social campaigns. Estimate how long you think tasks will take so you can accurately create a picture of what your team can deliver.
Step 4: Sprint!
So you’ve got your backlog in order, estimated your backlog, clarified your requirements, planned your sprint and created a collaborative workspace. Now you’re ready for sprint
Step 5: Stand Up And Be Counted!
Hold a daily stand-up meeting. The whole team must be present. It’s not optional. The whole team must be involved. The team stands, in a half circle around their Sprint whiteboard. This is where Scrum gets its name.
Each team member reports back to the team in turn about what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today and if there is anything holding them up. Only the person reporting back should speak at one time.
Step 6: Review, Reflect, Repeat
Hold a meeting and invite all the relevant stakeholders so you can review what was delivered in the Sprint and demo. Then, hold a Sprint Retrospective meeting. Invite the whole team. This meeting is not for the wider stakeholders. Typically it might follow on immediately from the Sprint Review. The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to reflect on how things went during the Sprint. It’s a chance for the team to discuss the Sprint and consider how they could improve things.
So there you have it, whether you’re able to go full agile or cherry pick the aspects that may make your work more productive, agile is the future of delivering websites, social, digital and marketing campaigns and taking full advantage of expertise from throughout your business .
How do you make a social media audience share your video even if it is completely irrelevant to them and their interests? The answer: prankvertising. One agency to experience great success with is Thinkmodo, who specialise in viral video. The concept of setting up a prank and filming it so it will go viral seems like a tricky concept.
How do you pull off a prank?
Well the answer, for Thinkmodo, was a full scale production. Cleverly organised and put together. More mini movie than a funny home video. One of their most successful videos to go viral was the Carrie in the coffee shop prank.
It is infamously difficult to win over an audience with a film remake. Therefore, when the PR team for the film remake of Stephen King’s Carrie needed to plug the horror, to a new audience, they saw the importance in capturing potential fans on social media.
Good ol’ pranks that we miss.
Why it worked
The key is to give your audience something entertaining and worth sharing on social media. The prank was brilliantly relevant, well-acted and slick, A ‘telekinetic’ secret camera stunt. Stuntmen and actors are used to shock the public in the coffee shop and create a Carrie like scene. The footage was so amusing and impressive so it went viral. Bloggers went crazy for it and more people got excited about the movie.
The new campaign
This year, Thinkmodo have made an outdoor comeback with the viral video Devil Baby Attack to promote the film Devil’s Due. An animatronic “devil baby” in a remote controlled buggy goes on a rampage through the streets of New York City and hidden cameras record people’s reactions.
Why it worked
Thinkmodo have effectively proved that advertising on social media doesn’t have to be directly relevant in order to obtain a large audience and get people talking. The devil baby is creative and worked because it has created a tangible character. Unlike, the character of Carrie, who we are already familiar with, Thinkmodo have created a distinctive individual that makes the prank and the film easier to reference.
Prankvertising on a Budget
Thinkmodo had a large budget in order to promote these movies. However, there are still learnings that we can take from this. If you’re prankvertising on a shoe-string, you need to make your video content entertaining. From the Thinkmodo campaigns, we have learnt that the video doesn’t have to capture your brand completely; it can even be loosely related. This gives you a lot more to work with and a lot more room for creative licence. Other key ideas are:
Create a memorable character making it easy for your audience to reference.
People love candid camera. It’s easy to do and cheap to produce but be aware of legalities.
Make use of a location (like the Carrie video). Ask a shop/bar if you can film for free for an hour – it’s free advertising for them too.
Use a home video rather than expensive equipment. This may be your only option anyway but it makes the content raw and appears like less of a stunt. Think of it like the ‘You’ve been Framed’ TV show.
Try video apps such as Vine, Instagram, and Video Star to make your footage.
Make sure that you find your footage entertaining. Ask yourself if you would share this.
Reactions from Twitter
People engaged really well with the Thinkmodo content.
Not only did celebs tweet about the prank, but major news sites tweeted about the campaign, including New York Huffington post, Mashable, The Guardian, The Telegraph and many more.
So, as you can see, if you can get you prank to gather momentum, then you could get big wigs tweeting about your brand too.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau studied the most successful digital campaigns of 2013 and rewarded the brands that did best at the IAB Mixx awards. To do so, the IAB asked a group of industry experts to help figure out just what it was that made such an impression on the people. So, how did social media help with the success of these campaigns? If we study this year’s campaigns from Axe, Toshiba and Coca-Cola, we come to understand that social media users are interested in campaigns that offer something beyond the product.
AXE – MEN’S FRAGRANCE
The axe campaign of 2013 engaged with the audience because it turned audience preconceptions of the ad on its head. By creating the Susan Glenn Character, a fictional yet relatable being whom men want to approach but don’t quite know how, the brand actually conveys female empowerment, dodging original misogynists perceptions of this men’s fragrance.
The conclusion of the ad is that the Axe fragrance will help men overcome their fear and “Fear no Susan Glenn”. Therefore, the advert engages and empowers both demographics, making it enjoyable and relatable. The advert offers more than the brand or product because the audience can connect with it on a personal level.
If we think all social media is to an extent, personal, what you share relates to what you feel and think. Therefore, by reaching the audience with a significant storyline, it can only maximise shares.
The Axe team were instrumental in feeding the hype on social media. On Tumblrs, slang dictionaries, and message boards, Axe representatives described \”Susan Glenn\” as the one super attractive, cool woman every man has lusted after but never had the courage to ask out on a date. The Unilever brand ultimately revealed it was behind the meme with a commercial starring Kiefer Sutherland as a forlorn adult wishing he\’d had the guts to approach his Susan Glenn. Therefore, the engagement after Sutherland also appealed to both demographics as it depicts the famous actor as quite pathetic and amusing, all of which can be overcome with Axe.
The axe ad suggests that in 2014 we will begin to see organisations attempting to engage with multiple demographics through one ad. We have seen the success of targeted facebook ads. Facebook is a beneficial platform for advertisers, in that we often know a person’s age, gender and interests. However, if we create a common ground that can be discussed by a much wider audience then this may be even more successful on social media in 2014.
Engaging with multiple demographics simultaneously.
Creating a fun, relatable and cult character.
Celebrity endorsement to add humour (Kiefer Sutherland).[/box]
TOSHIBA
The Beauty Inside was a six-part, 30-minute online film made by Intel, Toshiba, and their agency, Pereira O’Dell, to stress the importance of inner beauty, not just with regard to human beings, but the Intel chips inside every Toshiba laptop.
The story centred on a character named Alex, who wakes up every morning in a different body, and falls in love with a woman named Leah. Because Alex was a different person every day, Intel and Toshiba invited the public to try out for roles in the series and to film themselves saying certain lines of dialogue, which were then included in the series.
The videos, which included beautiful cinematography and a touching, happy ending, generated more than 70 million views worldwide and an approval rate of 97% on YouTube.
The Beauty Inside was a hit because it tied in perfectly to the reason people use social media in the first place: to share their stories with the world. Furthermore, the use of the public in the video gives makes the video relatable to social media users, a sense of community.
Intel and Toshiba allowed the public to help them tell a story about an item (the computer chip) that is often difficult to form a narrative around. Therefore, similar to the Axe advert, the campaign was a success on social media because it makes a usually boring object, fun and applicable to everyday life. We could learn a lot from this for 2014 social media campaigns and we should see more obscure objects communicated in an abstract yet clear way.
Creating an engaging story about an inanimate, complicated object.
Short yet effective. 30 minutes long so great for social sharing.
Inviting the public to be involved to create a sense of community – good for social community.
COCA-COLA
Coca-Cola and its agency Leo Burnett earned more than 58 million social media impressions with their Small World Machines, which were video chat terminals that allowed Pakistanis and Indians to connect with each other in real time. The machines were placed in public spaces in Pakistan and India, and beckoned citizens of the rival nations to virtually touch hands and create visual art by tracing the designs on the touch screen terminals.
The campaign was popular on social media because the consumers were able to see benefits beyond the products. Coca-Cola was one of several brands to make an ad this year about bridging the divide between India and Pakistan, joining a Google ad that highlighted the power of its geo-location and search technologies.
The campaign was popular on social media because it is current and relevant. Everyone at some point has experienced a language or cultural divide. Social media aims to bridge that gap and Coca Cola successfully did so in a visual and ‘shareable’ way. We will begin to see more brands doing this in 2014. The appeal is offering the idea that your brand can offer something unique to the world.
Bridging cultural gaps, in the way social media does.
Emphasising their company philosophy which is to ‘share a Coke’, share an experience.
Conveying benefits beyond the product so social media users without loyalty to Coca-Cola are still likely to share.
What Should Inspire the Campaigns of 2014?
Create great story-telling and strong visuals because this is what people like to share. It’s all about storytelling!
Aim to reach wider demographics. Of course, remember to keep your media targeted but not exclusive.
Bridge social and cultural gaps through social media. Don’t force your brand into this, but come across as sensitive and try and bridge gaps wherever you can. Strike an emotional chord.
Communicate complicated concepts/objects in an abstract way. Infographics are a great way for you to express yourself and your brand, graphic videos are another that you can use.
The key thing we can take from each of these award winning ads, is that, this year’s social campaigns will aim to convey life enrichment. Is your brand ready?
