How A Mock Facebook Profile Can Transform Your Strategy

I once worked with a long-running TV show that needed to launch a digital content plan. The team tasked with this effort was excited, but as is so often the case, nobody knew quite where to start. The options seemed endless: Let’s make a newsletter! No, we could shoot a series of short videos! No, wait, how about building an app?

In order to sift through these choices and allocate resources efficiently, the team needed to understand their audience’s behaviors, motivations and needs. They also needed a sense of what their audience didn’t want or no longer cared about. The problem is, organizations rarely have a unified, specific vision of who their target customers are and what they value.

That’s why you get stuck in conversations like this:

“We’re dealing with people who love TV, so we should tap into that passion.”

“Really? I think they’re watching out of habit. We should figure out a way to re-invigorate them.”

In an ideal world, there’d be a comprehensive, up-to-date set of customer research data that could resolve these disputes in a flash. Here in the real world, we need other solutions. One exercise that helps is something I call the Mock Facebook Profile.

It’s pretty simple: by filling out details of a basic Facebook profile, you and your team can assemble what you know and believe about a customer segment and represent it via a single, fictional character. Obviously, this is no way…