Twitter: Persona development

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Jacqueline

In my previous post I tried to analyse the way Twitter works on an abstract level and got rather carried away at the end on why it’s such a phenomena. Today I want to return to defining an online strategy for Twitter by doing some persona development.

I’ve jotted down 6 user types and will do the first three in this post:

  • For social reasons – personal user
  • As work – on behalf of a company
  • The generalist – information gatherer, producer and social user
  • Producer – the writer
  • For work – interaction designer
  • Analyst – campaign tracker

For social – personal user

I use Twitter to talk to friends, make friends

Name: Joanne
Age:35
Family: Married, two children
Occupation: Stay at home mom
Interests: Celebrity gossip, photography, travel

Technical profile:

  • Comfortable – can do all the basics, spends a lot of time online.
  • Access Twitter through PC.
  • Usage: Spends 2-3 hours throughout the day on Twitter

Needs:

  • Uses Twitter to stay in touch with friends and family back home
  • Very social – talks to people all the time

Follows:

Friends, family, celebrity channels, fashion websites, celebrity profiles, photography, travel

Primary network: Friends/ family and people
Secondary: Other SAHM

As work – on behalf of a company

“I’m the community manager for TravelCo 123″

Name: Daniel
Age: 28
Family: Girlfriend
Occupation:Community manager
Interests:
Football, travel, new media, theatre and movies

Technical profile:

  • Good technical skills, needs software to manage his twitter account, accesses personal twitter account through phone, at work and home.
  • Spends most of his work time at online

Responsibilities at work include:

  • write posts for company blog on interesting locations to visit
  • update content for company website
  • interact with users on company website
  • posting on facebook and twitter every day
  • generate interest in specials
  • user acquisition for website

Daniel runs three twitter accounts:

  • he has access to the company account
  • his own company account
  • personal twitter account

Needs

  • Information on who to follow
  • Generate lots of content

Primary network: Travel network
Secondary network(s): Web professionals, Friends

The generalist – producer, web professional, information junkie

“I use twitter to get information about my interests, talk to other IT professionals but also need to market my jewellery to a certain extent.”

Name: Jacqueline
Age:34
Family: Married
Occupation: Project manager
Interests:Science and technology, science fiction, crafts, macro photography, gaming, web design and development

Technical profile:
Excellent, online for large part of the day, limits time on social media websites, accesses twitter from home and work.

Needs

  • Staying in touch with friends in other countries
  • Find help on running handmade business
  • Distribute information
  • Redistribute information

Primary network: Etsy crafting network
Secondary network(s): Web professional, arts and crafts, science-fiction

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How Twitter functions

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Jacqueline

Thinking about social marketing strategy – Twitter

Social media websites simulate networks and allow information to pass between nodes. Yes, I know it’s obvious, but user experience overrides basic function. Most people think of Twitter as a place to talk to friends or where company marketing happens. If we don’t return to the basic function, how can we come up with good strategies?

In short, strategy consist of:

  • Business owner objective
  • User objective
  • Success metrics

For a complete solution you also need to consider operational aspects and tools needed.

Twitter

When you have a Twitter profile you’re both business owner and user.
Main goal: Gather information from other users, distribute information

Twitter functionality fulfil the following user requirements:

  • Social interaction
  • Information
    • Gathering: finding information that interest you
    • Distributing: content creators distributing information
    • Redistributing information: sharing links etc.
    • Analysing information

The power of social media cannot be explained with dry user requirements and functionality. The magic for that lies in the networks. How easy it is to find a network of people with similar interests – a sub-group who are just like you.

The power an individual obtained to share their view – as we’ve seen with the political upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt to name just two examples.

The importance for journalists and even human rights activists to track events in unsafe areas.

How easily artists can market their work, mostly because they’re part of a community of other artists who help and support them.

Providing an online water cooler for people who work from home. Or just spending their time having a chat.

In my next post I’ll do some persona development to get back to the business of defining a Twitter strategy.

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Interaction overview

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Jacqueline

One of the first things I do when I start a new online project is to create an interaction document.

After talking to the business owner I take the notes I made and turn it into a diagram. It does not follow any formalised methodology, my goal is to have a visual aid that I use to form the mental model of the project.

I’m currently working on my online business strategy and this is how the first version of my document looks.

Online presence: interaction overview

As you can see it’s a weird amalgamation of requirements, workflow, comments and icons. But while I work on the project I keep updating it and have stuck up where I can have a look at it.

Usefulness

  • Most useful while planning projects
  • I often consult it to ensure that I don’t forget overall strategic requirements when designers or developers want to change functionality defined in the functional specification
  • In functional requirements meetings
  • I sometimes use it when the project is in the maintenance phase
  • Defining risk – this document is relatively simple – but when a third-party payment provider, external data feeds or dependency on help desks are part of the project it’s useful to have this visual map

Any questions? Let me know, I’m always happy for ideas on blog posts.

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2012

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Jacqueline

I don’t like setting resolutions but I like having a theme for my year. For me, 2012 is special and all about new experiences.

We moved back to South Africa after living in Europe for 10 years and took a sabbatical for the past 6 months to reacquaint ourselves with the country, family and old friends.

This year we have to settle in, find jobs, a place – and even city – to live. It’s all very exciting.

My resolution

I tend to worry about stale information getting pushed around. I’ve decided in 2012 I will share knowledge – my thoughts and experiences around creating and maintaining successful websites – and hopefully contribute to the body of knowledge.

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Protonode relaunched

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Jacqueline

To be honest, resurrect may be more apt.

Previously…

I ran Drupal which was complete overkill – for what was essentially – a static website.

Now…

I moved it to WordPress and want to start blogging on digital project planning and management.

The plan

For the next two weeks I’ll write daily posts – well maybe not on weekends
Then I plan a post a week – unless I’m on holiday or too busy.

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