Posted By
Jamie Beckland on 06/18/2010
Ed: This post is part of White Horse’s occasional series of slogs (speed blogs). Slogging—a concept we created here at White Horse—riffs on improv comedy concepts to create interactive writing activities. These short games bore fruit with tons of great ideas. Read more on White Horse slogs.
For this slog exercise, we created word mashups in order to define new concepts that White Horse could bring to bear on the digital marketing conversation—some were interesting concepts, some ridiculous, but all were creative solutions.
User personas have been a part Web design since the early 2000s. The concept is straightforward: you create archetypal users, then use those constructs to clarify intention and create task paths that work for those users.
White Horse now takes the concept a step further—to personavation.
Personavation uses personas in new, innovative ways. We don’t limit personas to site design anymore, but instead, push their usage into the social realm in a robust way. Defining social user personas allows us to effectively target social messaging, improving reach while decreasing efforts of channel maintenance.
Personavation can also impact our hiring process. We may start asking prospective candidates to personavate themselves in order to see how they fit into the larger organization.
Personavation can even go into how we decide which clients we want to work with. We might create personas of different enterprise-level organizations, then use those personas to vet which clients are the best fit for our strengths. That understanding helps us align opportunities with our own capabilities.
In design, personavation allows us to speak to an audience in a visual language that they understand. We might be surprised to find out how many users actually like the Comic Sans font.
You can use personavation in all sorts of ways. How do you personavate? Please share your ideas in the comments.
Tags: social seeding, Web promotions
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