Audience Persona

A customer persona (also known as a buyer persona) is a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large segment of your audience, based on the data you've collected.

Demographics

This information will inform all future community development activities. It will guide how you structure the community platform, the activities you host for the community, the discussions you initiate, who you reach out to and how you sustain high levels of activity.

Location

• The location of your members is relevant when creating content, developing sub-groups, developing communities of place/interest, arranging meet-ups, or initiating relevant discussions.

• The best way to identify location is from an organization’s own records or by an analysis of its existing web traffic—especially to those areas which show a heightened interest in the organization/topic (e.g. company history page).

• Google Analytics and Alexa both provide a good location overview of visitors to any given website.

• You want to identify clusters of people.

Age and gender

• This information should be compiled either from existing records or from a survey to those who already visit the site.

• One way to gather this information is to look at magazines that target this audience and request their advertising material. Alternatively, look at who advertises to this audience and analyze who their target audience might be.

Profession

• If the organization’s community is job-related (communities of practice, for example), it is useful to have an understanding of the job titles of members of your organization.

• Reviewing 20 to 30 LinkedIn pages from a random sample of target members.

Audience Habits

• Specifically you need to know what they do online, what internet tools they use, what they read, what they do in their spare time, and when they are usually online. Each answer is essential to creating a practical community development plan and ensuring the community remains relevant to an audience’s experiences.

Conducing a Survey

• What tools and platforms do members use? This will guide your community site development process. You will use the tools members are most familiar with. This should be a multiple-choice question.

• What does the audience read online? This will guide your promotional activities, your status-enhancing activities and your relationship activities. This should be a multiple-choice question along with space to add their own reading materials.

• What aspects of the topic are the audience most interested in? What sustains the attention of your audience? What topics make the audience emotive?

• What time do they browse the internet? This should be a pure multiple-choice question.

• Specifics of habits related to the topic. When do people participate in the topic, for how long, what specific aspects of the topic do they participate in? What are their processes for participating in the topic?

Psychographics

Finally, you want to know what the audience thinks and feels.This is more important than you might imagine. Most positioning efforts for a community are based upon psychographics, not demographics.

Psychographics are commonly researched through the Interest, Activities, and Opinion (IAO) variable framework. Others embrace a wider framework that includes the target audience’s attitudes and values.

For the purposes of online community research, learning the attitudes and values of a target audience is unnecessary. Semantic definitions vary and interpreting an audience member’s remark and attributing it to an underlying value is subjective.

Mainly, however, community managers don’t work at the values and attitude level. A community manager does not change someone’s values or attitudes. Community managers identify what people are interested in and build a community around those interests.

Interview Technique

• Psychographics analysis requires interviewing individual members of the target audience. Contact five to 10 potential or existing members and schedule interviews with them.

• 15 minutes. The longer the interview lasts, the more willing participants will be to say anything to end the interview. So keep interviews short and sweet.

• During these interviews you need to ask them how they became interested in the topic, their fondest memories, what their lives are like, what they are worried about, what they would love to see within that topic in the future, thoughts on topical issues and other pertinent questions.

• Interviews you should create transcripts

• Identify the specific phrases they use. Ramit Sethi refers to this as the mindreading technique. You can later echo back to the entire audience the specific phrases members use.

• The final interview question should be, “Would you like to be one of the founders of the community?”

Interview Questions

Questions For Your AudienceBiggest problems/challenges

• What key issues do they care about?

• What are they struggling with?

• What are they worried about?

• What interests members? What do they mention without being prompted?

Experiences (successes, failures)

• How did they become interested in the topic?

• What is their average day like?

• What have been their biggest achievements/failures?

Aspirations

• What are their hopes, fears and aspirations?

• What are their commonly held symbols within the field?

• What language do they use when discussing the topic?

Personas

Support Persona

CRITERIA	DESCRIPTION
CAPABILITIES	Deep knowledge of the product Experience of the product in a variety of scenarios and configurations Effective problem-solver. Has experience solving other people’s problems Good communicator and able to provide guidance easily in written form
EXPERIENCE	Familiar with online and community support Product experience will be variable, but fairly experienced in using it to solve practical problems (not a newbie) Some limited experience in online communities
MOTIVATIONS	Product discounts Exclusive access to early features or unique material, content, or experiences Helping people Recognition in the community Broader awareness of her business
FEARS	Providing inaccurate information Providing answers that may cause problems or break something Imposter syndrome (fear that you may not be as talented as other people think you are)
REWARDS	Swag Financial (e.g., gift cards) Recognition and validation of her contributions

Event Organizer Persona

CRITERIA	DESCRIPTION
CAPABILITIES	Coordinating and running events Putting together content, speakers, and other material for an event Working with venue, food/beverage, and other vendors Handling and working with sponsors and sponsorship funds
EXPERIENCE	Has run a number of small local meetups Was a volunteer for a local conference
MOTIVATIONS	Loves to bring people together Enjoys face-to-face engagement and in-person discussion Enjoys working with knowledgeable and notable speakers and sponsors Enjoys being in the limelight when running the event
FEARS	That no one will show up That speakers are not interested in speaking at his events That he embarrasses himself and the community with a poorly run event That an event loses money (not covering costs)
REWARDS	Acknowledgement of running great events Building his career experience and expertise Appreciation at the end of an event for putting it together Awards and recognition

Community Persona Maturity Model

• Measures users Community Persona Maturity Model:

• Individual Value. What is the measurable value that this persona should deliver for themselves

• Community Value. What is the measurable value that this person has provided to help their fellow community members?

• Peer Value. What is the measurable value that the person has provided to help their fellow community members?

• Leadership Value. What is the measurable value the person has given in providing leadership in the community?"