Hey Gang,

This week we've got a special guest in Whiteboard Studios, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive. Ian and Rand discuss the marketing tactic of creating "personas." If you've ever seen "Shaun of the Dead" (and if you haven't, you should), you'll remember the scene where Shaun and Ed are sitting in the pub making up personal histories for the other bar patrons.

Turns out this is not just a fun way to kill time over a few pints--it can also be an important tactic in evaluating your customer base for both marketing efforts and product development. Personas are essentially imaginary friends, or clients, to be more precise. You invent entire back stories, personalities, quirks, and needs for all of them, then evaluate how each of them would likely react to your products or campaigns.

While it may seem a little far-fetched at first, Ian makes a compelling case both in this video and in several posts on Portent Interactive's blog, for the use of Persona modeling. The video is a bit long (~20 minutes) but definitely worth checking out if you're interested in a new and valuable strategy for helping to direct your campaigns.

Due to the length of the video and size of the file, I'm testing out Google Video this week in order to avoid having to serialize this installment, like I've had to do with YouTube in the past. Let me know if you experience any problems with display or download of the video. Enjoy!

UPDATE from the SEOmoz team: Oops! This video was created using a service that's no longer in use. Instead, please enjoy the 4-part blog series Rand links to below.

UPDATE from Rand: Don't miss Ian's 4-part blog post series on Personas:

• Part I: Creating Great Personas
• Part II: The 4 Rules of Personas
• Part III: 3 Rules for Applying Personas to Email Marketing
• Part IV: Search Marketing & Personas: Opening Your Customers Heads

You might also be interested in Grokdotcom's blog post on the topic - Use of Personas Boosts Conversion by 400% - and 37Signals' post, arguing why they don't use them.