Converging in on Your Online Persona

I’ve posted about the creation of online personas and where they may live (the browser vs. the social network) and recently read (and commented on) a post entitled Firefox Could Be the Real Facebook Challenger by Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web. This is an excellent post and sites several reasons for Marshall’s belief that these two companies will soon be in the same business. Some of those reasons are:

• Jeremiah Owyangs recent Forrester report on the Future of Social Web
• Google is going to build in OpenID into their next version of Chrome.
• Firefox is going to be allowing you access to your applications via their updated browser
• Facebook recently launched a desktop application

This convergence is going to happen. You’re going to be able to travel throughout the Internet and marketers are going to know who you are and what you want. (All of this combined with Google knowing what you’ve been Tweeting about and other businesses like Fuser mining the data contained in your email; with your permission of course.) Once the data is collected, targeting micro-segments technically gets pretty easy.

The wild card in this scenario is of course the iPhone app (not to mention mobile in general). Applications on iPhones are responsible for a lot of ad revenue for companies like AdMob. I spoke with AdMob and they will work with developers to get them information about the user that clicked on the ad. This is a tremendous value add (not ad) for marketers. There will also need to be an unprecedented amount of collaboration between businesses to help create accurate user personas. For those of you that don’t like the whole idea (like my wife) you should be given complete control over their personas.