Business Design Intelligence

I read the most recent article from my friend Joseph Carrabis on iMedia Connection: "Intelligent Website Design". The article could as well been entitled "Business Design Intelligence" because it goes far beyond designing the website and address the brand and positioning of the whole company.

There are some unique nuggets of wisdom in his article, a must read for people who are beginning with web analytics and the concepts of site optimization. Even experienced web analysts will find it worthwhile: Joseph takes eMetrics.org, the brainchild of Jim Sterne (a web marketing guru himself), as an example.

"The first message is not from you to your market, it's from your market to you"
Joseph Carrabis

The eMetrics rich persona

In his article, Joseph presents the rich persona for speakers that presented at the San Francisco eMetrics Summit. The nice thing is this was done BEFORE the summit, without knowing much about who would actually be presenting. This work was based on NextStage Evolution's own methodology (Joseph Carrabis is president of NextStage). Here's what the persona looked like:

• 35-45-year-olds who have been analyzing websites for 10-plus years both in and out of corporations
• That have been doing web analytics for 5-10 years, and ditto for large and small businesses
• That have spoken/presented at major conferences
• That have "hands-on" knowledge of at least five different analytics platforms
• That have product neutral (no commercial affiliations)
• That are patient with ignorance

I had the chance to be a speaker at the San Francisco eMetrics Summit conference, and not surprisingly, my profile match very closely this persona. I think one of the only element that didn't work out very well is the fact that English is not my mother tong, so some communicational elements were a bit harder to convey without the perfect fluency of the language. But still, I look forward to other opportunities to be a speaker, something I truly enjoy and find very motivating.