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User Analysis

Carlos

Carlos is a 24-year old CEO of an early stage startup in social selling. He is single and very dedicated to his business so he spends most of his time working on developing his business, specifically spending 90% of his time managing professional relationships.

As the CEO of a social media startup, he is very socially minded, so he manages these relationships through many different mediums (Twitter, LinkedIn, Email, Phone). He primarily deals with four kinds of people: advisors, investors, clients, and potential talent. Despite the differences between these groups, he sees the workflow involved with interacting with them as largely the same.

He first interacts with these people at the top of the pipeline, reaching out to them in low touch ways to "remind them that [he] exists" and begin to build a relationship. He realizes that whenever he sends someone an email he is essentially putting a todo on their list, so he uses social media to build the relationship in a friendlier way, using liking and retweeting to "build relationship karma". In the middle of the pipeline he works on getting to the deeper form of communication, an email, a phone call, or a meeting. His goal is always to "get back to a deeper channel... to have a human relationship." At the bottom of the pipeline he is concerned with continuing the relationship and making sure he can get to his goal with that person.

He wishes he had an easy way to see the history of their interactions so he could pick up a relationship after a while of non-contact. He tries to manage about 20-50 relationships at a deep level at any given time, and can keep in contact with as many as 100 at a time.

Lessons Learned:
  • Professionals move their contacts through a series of stages of interaction
  • Social interactions are fundamentally different from email, phone, meetings
  • People can only manage a finite amount of relationships, they need an easy way to pick back up later
  • Many professionals spend most of their work-day managing these relationships
  • All methods of communication are necessary because they all have a slightly different purpose

Chong

Chong is a 21-year old college student studying computer science and interface design. At a young age, Chong started designing websites and started his own freelance design firm. Through it he has managed many clientele. Chong first got started by doing voluntary work for people in his hometown. From there, we began building out his clients through personal recommendations.

Now, at 21 years old, he has a good reputation and no longer seeks recommendation, rather they are loaded upon him. For each of his potential clients, he does some background research by looking through their various social media profiles to discover what they have worked on in the past and if he would be interested in working with them in the future. He even sometimes is introduced to potential clients solely through Twitter.

Chong mentions however, that none of his communications with his potential clients occur over social media beyond the initial introduction. The rest of his communication occurs over email so that it is consolidated in one location and easy to search through.

Lessons Learned:
  • Chong uses social media to vet potential clients
  • Because of the difficulty in aggregation, most of his communication occurs over email
  • Chong is introduced to potential clients over Twitter

Nadiya

Nadiya is a 26-year-old public relations representative at a large marketing firm. She represents a wide variety of clients, ranging from small retail businesses in suburban shopping malls to large production and media companies in Los Angeles and New York. Nadiya’s primary role is to enhance clients’ social media presence using a strong online visibility strategy targeted specifically for her clients’ industry and market.

Nadiya uses a variety of methods for enhancing her client’s presence online, including posting tweets and statuses from her clients’ accounts, promoting her clients from her company’s account by connecting them with potential partners, and posting about clients’ new products or offers. However, since Nadiya has to do many of these things across many platforms, she performs a number of repetitive tasks by reposting the same things on different services.

Lessons Learned:
  • Interactions can be difficult due to the repetitive nature over multiple platforms
  • Client interactions can change based on the need of the client

User Classes

Long Term Salespeople
  • Primarily focused on fewer, high-quality relationships
  • Relationships require interactions on the scale of several weeks between contact (edit?)
  • Overall goal is a number of strong professional relationships, built up over time
  • Users like Carlos and Nadiya manage a number of long-term clients (edit)
Short Term Salespeople
  • Primarily focused on a large volume of interactions, and shorter relationships
  • Clients require few, but immediate interactions in the short term
  • May move between clients very quickly
  • (thing about chong)
General Properties
  • Professionals who communicate over many different modes of communication
  • Users saavy with social media tools, like twitter and linkedin
  • Ages 20-60 (professional age)
  • White collar, jobs that require relationships to be managed in scale and over distances
Request-Makers
  • Users who primarily manage contacts in order to make requests
  • Users like Carlos, heads of businesses who primarily manage relationships in order to gain something professionally
  • They are interested in seeing the status of these relationships, building karma
  • They are the ones making contact
Request-Receivers
  • Users who primarily manage contacts in order to fulfill requests
  • Users like Nadiya and Chong who deal with people coming to them
  • Interested in keeping tabs on all the people contacting them, easily vetting them when the request is seen
  • They are the ones receiving contacts

Goals

  • Quickly aggregate multiple social media profiles (Nadiya)
  • Easily view history of social media interactions with a client (Nadiya)
  • Method to vet and interview potential clients (Chong)
  • Keep track of different stages of a relationship (Carlos)
  • No labels