More invisible than a banner ad! Able to leap right-column skyscrapers in a single bound!

Why, look, up in the sky...isn't that the flashing "New!" graphic coming from the commissioner's office? There must be a conversion problem in Gotham! This is a job for...

Tamara, Online Marketing Hero! Conqueror of dastardly and complex Google SEO rules! More powerful than a well-constructed differentiator! Faster than a speeding call to action! Thank god she's here!

So yeah, apparently, I'm a hero. Oh, and a guru. But no pressure.

I was invited to do a very fun interview with Michael Miller, who talked to a bunch of folks who think a lot about online marketing. I haven't read all the chapters yet, but I'm looking forward to getting it. You can order it on Amazon, of course...but the publisher has also generously allowed me to post 'my' chapter as a downloadable sample (link is at the bottom of this post).

I have no idea why they think I'm a marketing hero or guru or whatever (it's especially interesting considering that I'm not even a marketer), but who am I to say no. I guess the 'guru' part means I have to go out and get a photo of myself with my chin on my hand, staring pensively out into the technical distance.

A few of my favorite self-quotes:

I believe success comes from banning the words “user” and “customer” from your organization, because I don’t believe they’re specific enough. I’d much rather see everyone in an organization going around and saying, “We want to create this feature for Maryanne, but we’re spending a lot of time on this other feature for Bobby. Don’t you think we should change our focus back to Maryanne, because we prioritized her?” To me, that’s success, because that laser focus on a very well-understood customer is absolutely magical in an organization.

And look! I said 'corporate underpants' in a real interview! I have no shame.

What corporate underpants means is that your org structure shows on your web site. If you can trace back each of your major navigation paths to a VP, you’ve got a problem. Just because you have these different P & L centers doesn’t mean that it’s going to make sense to Maryanne to go to a different place for each of them. Corporate underpants can show up on a site in a lot of ways. It’s making decisions about your site that are more about your internal organization and your internal goals than they are about the customer experience.

And this one, in which I crack myself up:

Marketing is a critical part of the stakeholder group that should be creating personas together, because marketers have so much great information about customers that they can bring to the table. Just like customer-centered design, the earlier marketing is involved, the better. If your job was to market the Pinto, not so much fun, right? Wouldn’t it have been great if you had been involved earlier and been able to say, “You know what? The market would really prefer a car that didn’t explode."

Download Tamara’s Online Marketing Heroes Chapter (pdf)

Why? because it's free, silly! Makes a great gift.

An interview on personas and marketing with...ME!

I did an interview with my friend and colleague Sally McKenzie on personas and marketing. We talked about how marketers should be involved in the persona creation process, common questions and concerns about the use of personas, the relationship between personas and other tools (like market segmentation), and how to ensure that a persona effort goes well. Check out the entire interview or the 'best of' below.

I like this section, where Sally talks about the relationship between market segments and personas. We discuss the different uses for each of these types of information, and the fact that internalized knowledge of your team is sometimes just as valuable as data:

TA: ....The other thing for marketers to remember is that personas are not about targeting. For targeting, you you'd want to figure out what kind of magazines Henrietta reads so you can publicize your value proposition to her in a way she will see it. For experience design (and in this case, I'm talking about 'product' as the web site designed to sell face cream) is really about how she wants to shop for and select a face cream. What kind of questions does she have that need to be answered in order for her to make the decision to actually press the button and purchase?

SM: When you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense because customer segments and personas basically have two different purposes in the organization. You need customer segments to focus your marketing activity and target your communication. You need personas to be able to design the right kind of user experience. So, you are implying that the use of real customer data in creating personas helps to bridge the gap between segments and personas, right? You can use the data in the segments to help create the personas.

TA: Yes, you can, and you should use data to create the personas, and this definitely includes all kinds of data collected by marketing. But what if you don't have the data? Lots of companies can't afford to collect lots of external data. This may sound a little bit heretical, but there's another way to think about data. The knowledge of the customer base that exists within the organization and all of the different brains is valuable data - just as valuable as the external data you collect.

The first thing I think is so helpful about personas is it gets all that knowledge on the table. Once you can share all the knowledge and assumptions that internal stakeholders have in their heads, you can make sure everyone is aligned in their thinking. The power of that agreement is so strong that in some ways you get 80% of the benefit of the personas right there. If you've been in a company for a while, the stuff in your head is not completely ad hoc. It's stuff you know and have absorbed. Having said that, there are several ways that real data can be really important. If you are in an environment that is very data driven and people won't even listen to you unless you have data, you need to bring in 'real' data.

Read the whole interview on Sally's blog.