Now, I’m not recanting anything I’ve previously said or written about personas. Detailed personas are valuable, provided they’re properly researched and used, and especially when a website needs to serve a variety of very different populations. Unfortunately, I tend to see detailed personas (just like “George”) that are invented — rarely researched and never tested. That’s not good enough. The whole point behind the persona development process is to test and verify what we think we know about our market. If you can’t stick to the full persona development process (I get it — it takes more time than we usually have), don’t make them up. You’re better off generalizing your personas in terms of one specific behavior, because no matter how detailed a persona may be, it cannot do its job without being framed in terms of buying. The good news is that the four stages of the buying cycle represent four personas that everyone doing marketing on the web has in common.

via Creating Website Content for Buying Cycle Personas.

Offline, people spend approximately 30-40 percent of their time talking about themselves, but on social media sites that number jumps to 80 percent. So it’s no wonder these channels are so hard to resist, as they’re all about you.

And you. And you. And you.

This infographic takes a closer look at social media’s effect on the brain

via This Is Your Brain On Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC] – AllTwitter.

The amount of data being generated on a daily basis by people and machines (the “digital universe”) is expanding at a rapid rate, providing a mass of Big Data potential, according to a new IDC study sponsored by EMC. The study concludes that 2.8 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created and replicated this year. (1 ZB = 1021 bytes.) Of all that data, the researchers suggest that slightly less than one-quarter would be useful were it to be tagged and analyzed. But, just 3% is tagged and only 0.5% is analyzed, leaving what the study dubs “the untapped big data gap.”

via Just 0.5% of the World’s Massive Trove of Online Data is Being Analyzed.

With two-thirds of the US internet population expected to belong to a social network by the end of 2013, according to eMarketer estimates, the majority of brands are now actively using social media to manage their digital presence.

Q3 2012 findings from media buying and solutions provider STRATA showed 91.9% of those surveyed were using social media. The vast majority (82.4%) of US agencies reported using Facebook for clients’ social media campaigns, nearly double or more the number using the popular platforms YouTube (41.9%), Twitter (36.5%) and LinkedIn (23%).

via Marketing Interest in Pinterest, Google+ Climbs – eMarketer.

Let’s get two things straight. First, journalists are genuinely busy. The reason I get about 60 emails per day is that I am freelance; were I on the staff of one of the Nationals instead it would be hundreds. So calling on the same day really, really isn’t clever. In recent weeks I’ve even had people phone within two minutes of sending the release – so the response, reasonably enough, is that I haven’t yet read it. The second thing is that we’re miserable, self-important curmudgeons. Oh come on, we earn a living by getting our name in print, you think deep down we’re modest people? So the chance to terminate a call by demonstrating we’re too busy to talk is often too good to resist.

via Guy Clapperton.

India is on the cusp of a full-fledged digital revolution, but substantial obstacles remain, according to a new eMarketer report, “India Online: Defining the New ‘Digital Class.’” Right now the country can best be described as a place of vast, untapped potential. Internet penetration in India remains quite low, at just under 9% of the population, but due to the country’s massive population, it trails only the US and China in terms of total internet users.

via Smartphones Speed the Digital Revolution in India – eMarketer.

I recently had drinks with a friend of mine who was the CTO of a hot venture-backed company that went on to be acquired by a large silicon valley company. One of the beautiful things about being a CTO is you don’t have to worry about marketing strategy and execution, and his old company had lots of PR-savvy talent. He’s now striking out on his own with a very cool product that he’s building as a solo entrepreneur, so for the first time he’s doing his own PR. In true lean startup fashion, he smartly did lots of user testing and even brought in a professional facilitator. In the process they discovered the people who were drawn to his product the most are female professionals age 20-35. This insight should help him immensely in targeting his marketing.

via How to know which publications and blogs to pitch – Muck Rack.

1 in 3 social media users have stopped following or “un-liked” a company or brand on a social network, finds Performics in December 2012 survey results. The most aggravating turn-offs for these former followers are irrelevance of posts (49%), over-frequency of posts (38%), and a lack of expected or promised content (35%). A separate study from SocialVibe and GfK finds that 37% have disengaged from their brand connections, with one-third of those blaming too many updates. As that study attests, losing these connections can have an impact on potential sales.

via Why SocNet Users Stop Following Brands – And The Lost Opportunity They Represent.

As many brands have spent the past several years engaging with customers and prospects on social networking sites, marketers have a good idea of what gets web users to connect. Typically, social networkers say they make “friends” with or follow a brand’s posts to find out about special offers and deals, and current research is consistent with that reasoning.Research has also been fairly steady on why consumers sometimes choose to un-friend brands. Engagement advertising firm SocialVibe found in October that one-third of US internet users who had ended a social connection with a brand did so because the company simply posted too many updates.

via Update Overload Remains Brands’ Biggest Social Danger – eMarketer.

4 in 10 emails sent are now being read on a mobile device, says Return Path in a new report, up 300% in the past 2 years alone. In fact, that 38% of email opens in the US now occurring on a mobile device surpasses the share of opens using a webmail account on a browser (31%) and via email desktop clients (also 31%).

via More Emails Being Opened On Mobiles Than Through Browser-Based Webmail.