Goal

After reading this article you'll:
  • understand personas
  • know how to build a persona
  • know how to use a persona
  • understand organisations
  • know how to create a new persona
  • be able to manage persona libraries

Summary

Personas are the digital representation of characters in your scenario. These characters can be real, fictional, live players, live role-players or automated.  

The amount of time and attention to detail you spend on each persona is up to you, only a name is mandatory.

Please be aware that a persona can have different identities in different social media channels.

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Persona Types


 Persona Type
 Explanation
 Stakeholder 
Characters in your scenario. Represents fictional or real people or organisations that communicate with the training audience. 

These personas represent stakeholders who interact with the players but are not part of the training audience. These stakeholder personas could be controlled automatically by Conducttr or by role-players or both.

Role-players are humans operating in disguise behind one or more stakeholder personas. Usually stakeholder personas are created by the scenario writer (author) whereas the player personas are created by uploading a team or at player registration.
 Organisation
Special type of stakeholder persona that has associations with other personas (employees) and has a website. Check article Websites/News Channel for more information.
 Player 
Represents the training audience

For example, a member of the crisis team called Rob will be presented in the scenario as himself, a player persona called Rob.
 Temporary
Temporary persona created dynamically during an exercise session.

In some exercises, new stakeholder personas can be dynamically created on-the-fly while the exercise is in progress. These personas are temporary personas and only exist for the duration of the exercise session. When the exercise is reset all the session personas are deleted.



Building a Persona

The level of detail that you to put into your persona is entirely up to you. So long as there is a name, Conducttr will run it! 

Hence, although there might seem to be a lot of fields available to complete it depends on your training goals and production pipeline whether these are necessary or not.

There are two types of fields:
  • exercise fields 👁️ - these hold information that is visible to the training audience or is necessary for the desired operation of the exercise
  • story fields 🎭- these hold story-related information that is necessary for scenario building and quality assurance (for example, to check message content for consistency and against biography)
You can access Personas via Personas tab in the Scenario Editor.

Multiple identities
Just as in real life, a persona can have multiple identities across different social media channels. By default, details you complete on the persona are copied through to the social media channels but you're free to overwrite each channel with unique details.

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A persona will automatically have Mail, Website, MicroBlog and GoSocial open. To add channels click the plus button. Alternatively, you can activate or deactivate channels directly on the tab via the toggle switch. 

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For information on how to alter the channels involving multiple personas, see this link: https://conducttr.helpdocs.com/personas2/bulk-persona-editing 



Using Personas 

Ensure that the persona publishing from the MEL is set as a "role player".

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Organisations


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Organisations are a type of persona that have employees (other personas) and a website - which is in addition to the usually social media channel accounts.
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Organisations allow players who are designated as employees to post on social media as their persona or as the organisation persona. For example, journalist Steve Blake who works for News24 can Tweet as Steve or as News24.


Creating a New Persona

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In List view, you can quickly add a persona directly in the MEL content
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 You can access the full persona to add details by right-clicking the persona name in the drop-down.


To import or replace a persona with one from a library or to generally just manage all personas, use the personas dialog.


What the fields mean
Remember that where it makes sense to do so, details entered on a persona's profile page will be auto-copied to it's account pages but these can be overwritten.
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Field
 Description
 Handle 🎭
This has two uses:

1. It's copied to social media accounts to use as an identity in those channels (though it can be overwritten)

2. It can be used by smartwords to access persona details. This makes writing quicker and easier to maintain consistency across lots of content. 

For example, if the persona's handle is "goodie" then {goodie.name} will print the persona's name. More about this in the smartwords article.
Faction 🎭
Faction is used: 
1. as a category grouping for personas to make them easier to find 
2. to remember associations/common narrative among personas of the same faction
 Job🎭
 What is this personas role within the company.  
Location 👁️
This detail is used in simulated metadata. For example when a persona tweets, they do so from this location. 
Impersonation 🎭
Impersonation allows anyone to post content as any person in your exercise.
More information on how to do this can be found here: https://conducttr.helpdocs.com/personas2/impersonation2 
Goals 🎭
 This is for your benefit to better understand the character of this persona
Personal info 🎭
This is for your benefit to better understand the character of this persona
Tags 🎭
 Searchable field to make it easier to find personas with similar tags
Persona Empathy 🎭
 Empathy is set at the level of individual persona within a range of -3 to 3 where -3 is aggressive/confrontational and +3 is conciliatory. 



Managing Personas

Persona Libraries
A key benefit of Conducttr TeamXp is that you can create libraries of almost anything, including personas. Having libraries makes it quicker to create exercises because now you can import pre-created personas

Exporting and Importing Personas
Personas can be imported from scenarios, stacks and library files.
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The button to export a persona library is in the top right hand corner of the persona library pop-up
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The import button is in the top left corner of the persona library pop-up. Click Design>Personas
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Click one or more personas to copy to the active library
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 Drag-and-drop to replace.


Merge allows you to select which attributes you want to keep or overwrite. 




Pairing with Pattern of Life

When you pair a Stack Library (see Pattern of Life) with a scenario, the scenario editor will compare personas in the scenario with personas in the stack library and, if it thinks it's found a match, ask you decide which one is to be used. This is to create consistency across your exercise.

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Check messages consistency

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Click this icon to view and edit all messages from this persona.

The beauty of this feature is it makes quality assurance really fast in terms of being able to check for consistency of voice and story progression across the exercise.


Upload during exercise


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When you upload a scenario, all the personas will be uploaded too. However, if during an exercise you need to refresh the personas with better profile fidelity (ie. a better/revised bio or better/changed profile image) then use the Upload personas button. This will update the persona details without disturbing any messages already published.