Hodes Voices

Imagine You’re Not You.

Jul 20, 2010 | Mark | Consulting, Digital, Employee Engagement, Employer Branding, Internal Communications, Millennials, Recruitment, Research, Social Media/Social Recruiting, Strategy

How did you get here?

Maybe you followed a link from a tweet. Or someone sent you the link via e-mail. Or you subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog.

The point is, in our multi-linked world people arrive at the same destination via very different paths. So when you design communications one of the first considerations must be to understand those paths and make sure your communications strategy takes each of them into account.

This is the philosophy behind the use of “personas” in communications design. Personas (or “personae” if you had Latin beaten into you by the Jesuits as I did) have been used in marketing research for roughly twenty years, mostly by packaged goods makers. Each persona is an amalgam of a set of prospective customers for the product under consideration; a product may have from a handful to a couple of dozen personas depending on the complexity and variety of the potential audience.

Their use helps marketers think about their potential customers as real people instead of abstract demographic data. Experience has shown that using personas helps marketers make better decisions about product management because they relate much better to people— albeit fictional— than they do to data.

In employment Web site design, for example, you may have prospective exempt and non-exempt candidates coming to your site. Breaking down the exempt candidates, you may have those with technical backgrounds, those with support experience (e.g., Finance and Accounting, Legal, HR, etc.), executives versus middle managers, and so forth. The number of personas is really determined by the number of demographic sub-sets of your potential applicant universe.

It’s possible, of course, to get too granular in such an exercise. Theoretically one could construct a separate persona for each visitor that comes to your site. Therefore you must cluster various attributes until you have a manageable number of personas to consider, each one representing a significant portion of your audience.

Now comes the fun part.

For each persona you need to think through their particular journey that brings them to your Web site and where they go— and why— while they’re there. In order to do that, you need to invent a “back story” that creates personal history so that your persona’s actions are consistent.

Start by giving your persona a name and a face. Make up a name that is real-sounding and that won’t be distracting (as funny names or famous names could be). Then pick a photograph of someone anonymous (i.e., NOT Brad Pitt or Lady Gaga) and use it when you refer to or think of this persona.

Now that your persona has an identity, you need to create a history for the fictional person. Hollywood does this routinely for movies and TV. In a recent interview, Leonardo di Caprio revealed that he and director/screenwriter Christopher Nolan spent four months laboring over the back story of Dom Cobb, the main character di Caprio plays in the new blockbuster Inception, before they ever started filming.

You won’t need to spend that amount of time, but you will need to flesh out the details necessary to understand and— to some degree— predict your persona’s behavior. These often include:

• Current occupation, employer
• Where they live
• Education
• Important demographics that might influence a job search, e.g., use of smartphones or mobile Web access, ability to relocate, race, ethnicity, lifestyle, etc.

Once you have completed your persona’s profile, now begin to think about how this “person” would probably find your Web site (or watch your video, etc.). What was the source? How did s/he get from there to your site? Why would s/he do that? What would s/he do once she got your site? What is s/he looking for? Is it easy to find?

What do you want the visitor to do— ask for more information? Register and set up a profile? Apply for a position? (You may not want every persona to do the same thing, so you should think very carefully about each one. And obviously a viewer of a video has different options than a Web visitor.)

There are dozens of questions about your persona that need to be answered. Many of those answers can be found in existing demographic or behavioral data. Others you may have to think through or ask of people you know who are similar to your persona.

Once you have completed your persona, next plot his or her journey to and through your planned site. Does your design satisfy the needs and wants of your persona? Are you emphasizing non-essential elements (e.g., fancy animated graphics) instead of what your persona really wants to find? Such “eye candy” may please the boss and win awards but it also may alienate the most important people of all— your prospective candidates.

Working with personas is challenging and fun, but it is also time-consuming and can be mentally draining. In the end, however, the results will be communications created with your end user in mind and ultimately that should mean more of them doing more of what you want. For more information, including a list of resources where you may learn more, click here.

If nothing else, the exercise of creating and thinking through personas helps you get outside of yourself and your own biases and preferences and put yourself in the place of your prospective candidate. That perspective will reveal a lot about what you need to communicate, and how, in order to be effective.