Persona Power

If you've ever gone to a website and thought, "wow... it seems as though this site is speaking directly to me" it probably is. At least some fictional version of you. Does that seem a bit freaky? Not to worry. You (probably) haven't been stalked. More likely, this particular site has likely been crafted using a persona-based methodolgy.

Persona-based design is one-part fictional characterization and one-part smart business analysis. It involves constructing a fictional customer and then using that character as the touchstone for design decisions. At Webtech, we do it by finding out everything we can about the “typical” person that will be visiting a web property and then creating a three-dimensional portrayal of that person. We use this portrayal to get “inside their headspace", breathe life into them and consider them in every step, from strategy to copy, functionality to graphical design.

As an online marketing team, persona-based design helps us help our clients by creating a vivid, tangible picture of their typical (or ideal) customers and then sculpting a message that resonates with them (relate), makes them “smarter” than they were before they got there (educate) and then moves them to inquire and/or buy (translate).

Bill Bernbach, a legendary figure in the history of American advertising, summed it pretty eloquently when he wrote:

“Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.”

Updating fields of a table with values from another table in MSSQL

Being quite adept with queries in MS Access, I was aware that you could join tables and update one table's fields with the values from an other table. However, I didn't know how, or if it was possible to do this in MSSQL. So, I did some research and found a solution.

The general structure of this type of update query in MSSQL follows a specific pattern.

1. Start with the traditional structure of an update table in MSSQL.
2. Put in the SET statements.
3. Use the table being updated as the FROM table.
4. Join the other tables you wish to pull values from.
5. Make you WHERE statements to control which records are update and selected.

Here is a simple sample that updates fields of one table with values from two other tables:

UPDATE tblOne SET tblOne.clientName=tblTwo.firstName+' '+tblTwo.lastName,
tblOne.clientAddress=tblThree.streetAddress+' '+tblThree.city+', '+tblThree.prov+' '+tblThree.postal
FROM tblOne
INNER JOIN tblTwo ON tblOne.clientID=tblTwo.id
INNER JOIN tblThree ON tblTwo.id=tblThree.userID
WHERE tblOne.clientID=1

Easy Peasy, and it saved me a lot of programming code in cfml to transfer information from one table to an existing record of an other table.

1st Choice and beyond

Here is an email I sent out that I believe we all need to see in respect to stepping up our game! This is what we will be doing for 1st Choice from this day forward!

Hi Gang,

1. Creative meetings 1 month minimum in advance of go-live
a. Define campaigns with Chad
b. Develop creative position
i. Print, lcd, stuffers, emailers, web, atm
ii. Contest, other collateral
c. Develop campaign objectives which are tied into conversion rates
d. Develop KCI/KPI – Key Conversion Indicator/Kep Performance Indicators
i. Jeff has the list of conversion
ii. Weekly review of targets

Contact Ron to move over to new graphics on ATMs – go through the maintenance budget for these to get done.
Look at the newsletter component has can we evolve.
Review personification, and addition of the new target group 17-24 years.
Quarterly meetings to review and set objectives upcoming.

Thoughts. I will put this on the blog.

Regards,

Let us step up our Game!

Hey Folks,

Our company's evolution is at the point where by the processes we go through for creative branding, strategizing and objective setting are GOLD for us and our clients. Let us make sure we apply the same focus that we put towards our clients projects as we do our own. This can be applied to the first direct marketing campaign toward CUs. Here is a list of elements that came out of an creating brainstorming session with Mr.Z, Kathy, Jeff and myself.

• Determine our AAA clients and set 90 day review dates, where we strategize with them and move them forward in the next 90 day period based upon KPI (key performance indicators) and KCI (key conversion indicators) with set dates of interim reviews within the 90 days
• Generate 10 AAA clients at a minimum of $5k-$10k per month
• Enhance the position of client care coordinator to that of one of a director of a set group of clients where our people intimately know the client

The more we improve our business, the more we can bring to our clients!

Let us all step up our game!

tx.

cc

Woopra

Woopra is a comprehensive, rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. Among features are live tracking and statistics, visitor and member tagging and real time notifications.

This thing blows google analytics and everything else out of the water. This app gives you real time results, shows you every single visitor that is viewing your site, and what they are doing. You can view where a certain visitor is from, their screen resolution, operating system, browser, what page they are on, etc. If you see a user is stuck on a page, you can even start up a chat with that specific user right on your site! 

This thing is da bomb, check it out:

http://www.woopra.com/

Google Code Search

The other day, Jeff had pointed out to me that Google has a code search. So, I had to take a look and blog about it.

If you go to http://www.google.ca/codesearch?hl=en and enter your search parameters and get results that are actually code examples.

I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet, but from what I've seen most of these code examples are provided by users who store code in one of Google's repositories (I believe it's called Google source). When the results are returned the file name that the code was found in is also returned. This is helpful because it will narrow down the possible language of the code example. For instance, if it is a .c file then its C programming language, or .cpp would be C++.

Next time I get stuck on code syntax or usability I'm going to try out this new search tool and see how it helps.

Suggestive Search

Hey Everyone,

As many of you may of noticed many search functions throughout the web are now going to what's called 'Suggestive Search'. What this means is once you start typing in your search request you are given suggestions based on the most popular results. These suggestions are made as you type each letter. Google has been working on this and it is being used in FireFox's Google search bar. Google also has it available in there Google Labs. Apple has been using this technology on their website for a couple of years now and they've added a cool feature where there are graphics displayed for major items within their site.

I'm not sure what type of coding is involved with creating this for our own sites (it's probably easy!) but it would be a useful tool for our clients. Many times before you've even completed entering you're search request you've found the page you're looking for. Let me know your thoughts.