Making A Difference... » Marketing

Don’t know what content to serve? Start with Persona

dienkwik — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 13:34:56 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with a site that I created a while back. My current goal is to study how to drive more traffic to the site. In my quest to do this, I’ve been facing problems specifically in the area of what content to serve such that existing readers will be interested to stay on and new readers will be interested to join.

I’ve asked the readers themselves about what they want or need. This results in several suggestions which are quite good and will be implemented soon. However, the number of suggestions is not nearly enough and I need more.

Why the problem with finding good content to deliver ? After a little introspection, I think my problem stems from the fact that I’m not clear who my target audience is, my target persona. In order to be clear about what content you should deliver, the first thing you have to do is to define what persona you are after. In hindsight, this seems obvious. However, it didn’t click until recently.

Persona for me means a representation of a particular segment of a market. Thus, after doing your segmentation with whatever method, you would then define the persona. You would make this representation come alive by giving it a name, a somewhat detailed description of what they do, where they live, what habits they have, etc.

This step of defining persona is crucial before you even think about what content to serve because different personas require different things and the content should be tailored to your target personas. Once the target personas (I think it is possible to have more than one target personas) are defined, then it should be a lot easier to think about what they value and thus to think about what content to serve them.

Time for me to get going on my personas!

Unlimited Lifetime Free Storage…. Irresistible !

dienkwik — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:40:14 +0000

After the longest time holding off on hosting my own sites and blogs, I finally caved in… What made me do it? It’s the enticement of getting unlimited lifetime free storage at DreamHost.

If man were designed to think rationally, I wouldn’t have been as compelled to sign up. After all, virtually all hosting companies offered somewhere around 500GB of storage for the same price. 500GB… How on earth am I going to use up all this storage ?

But no….. “Unlimited Lifetime Free Storage” seemed much much better than 500GB. Thus I let my guard down and signed up.

A great book on exactly this type of behavior is “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely.

CSR or Marketing ?

dienkwik — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:29:33 +0000

Have you ever wondered whether companies that are doing CSR are really doing it sincerely or merely as a marketing ploy ? How can you tell the difference ? Does it differ by intent alone ?

You may start doing CSR because you think that it’s the right thing to do: you get benefit from society, and you give back to society. But does it really matter if the public knows what you have done ? It shouldn’t matter whether or not the public knows about it, because it’s the right thing to do!

However, you may start thinking: well, okay, maybe I’m sincere, but the public doesn’t know that I am and what I have done for the community. One day I get attacked by a negative campaign. Will it hurt me me and my company then that the public doesn’t have a balanced view of my company ?

Dilemma, dilemma….