Persona Examples on the Net

Most people are interested in persona examples, but there are two reasons professionals do not publish them easily. First, most of the time they are protecting a customer's knowledge against their competitors. A persona built for one company will be very valuable for other companies in the same market. Second, they are protecting their intellectual property. Building personas is a highly sophisticated process, and by publishing the persona, other professionals will be able to see valuable company intellectual property.
Still, there are some persona examples available on the web. Some buyer persona, usability persona and brand persona can be found. None of them seems very detailed, giving the indication that their use - or usefulness - will be limited. 

Persona Example

The personas we have built are the most detailed and sophisticated we have seen in 10 years working with usability experts. They are property of our customers and cannot be published. Instead we offer you a small presentation we used in two workshops. It explains how personas are build, why they are so useful and show some crucial aspects  of the persona building process.

Product Potluck Austin, October 2009

Product Potluck was the "un-conference" taking place in Austin October 2009, following the huge success of the last "barcamp" summer 2009. There were three topics on the menu for marketing and two possible choices for the product strategy section for participants to choose from. 

When signing up for the potluck, I agreed to think about a possible topic, and this is the final title: "From the market to the market - Reclaim central strategy for marketing with personas". Subtitle was "from customer centric design to customer centric marketing to customer centric company".

Austin Marketing Syndicate Workshops

We repeated the workshops during two more in-depth sessions in December 2009 and January 2010 for the Austin Marketing Syndicate. This included a session to increase the depth and usefulness of a user persona. The Austin Marketing Syndicate promotes data driven marketing in the Austin area, with many members having more than 10 years high-tech marketing experience.

The days before the meetings I published the presentation and opened it for comments. Now the workshop is over, you can view the presentation with the results of the groups in the sessions.