Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat. Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.

Or, to put it another way: festival winter soon, economic input headgear.

CDA have just finished a research project looking at how people search and ‘find’ things online and how the process of search alters the language they use.

Most importantly, it looks at the implications for organisations who want to engage with these searchers and the language needed on their destination websites.

As a Christmas present, I’m delighted to offer visitors to the content lab a copy of the whitepaper - featuring research that takes a closer look at how people use language to search online and what that tells brands about the way they need to communicate.

Download our whitepaper

Merry Christmas and enjoy.

The earth moved for me this morning and it’s all thanks to a small knitted monkey dressed as the Queen of England.

And anyone currently considering online advertising, viral marketing, or how to maximise the cross-platform power of digital and print would be wise to take note.

Tea brand PG Tips has been exploiting the strangely mesmerising relationship between comedian Johnny Vegas and ‘Monkey’ for some time now. The partnership was originally conceived for a UK digital TV campaign in 2001. PG Tips repurposed the duo in 2007 as a tea loving odd couple with the Monkey holding all the intellectual high ground.

Now, in the run up to Chrismas, there is a new viral campaign showing Monkey doing an impressive impersonation of the British monarch delivering her Christmas Day state of the nation address, aided by occasional sips from a large glass of sherry.

Several takes and many sips later the ‘Queen’ has lost all sense of diction and deportment. (Any of you who can remember a very early radio gag called The Toastmaster by Michael Bentine will take particular pleasure in this.)

But what really sends me reaching for the headboard to steady my delicious sense of virtigo is how this campaign has teased out all that is good about digital communication.

Firstly, the ad from AKQA, makes no attempt to milk the PG Tips brand. We’re simply allowed to enjoy the sight of a knitted monkey in evening dress, tiara and lipstick getting progressively plastered. What’s not to like?

Secondly, The Guardian, who delivered the campaign as a news item, were able to use their Guardian.co.uk to show the clip. You can talk about knitted monkeys all you want but to truly understand the delights of a small puppet in drag getting of its face – well… you have to see the movie. Words, in this case, are simply not enough.

So thank you Monkey, for giving me a laugh this close to Christmas. I only have one question? Would you like to join the CDA Content Lab? We could use a talent like yours.

See Monkey get hammered

The internet, the web, the online… thingy can be likened to a teenager. It’s all about peer pressure and fitting in. (I haven’t quite figured out what the internet equivalent of spots is yet, but I suspect it has something to do with your server eating 1-in-50 emails and visiting websites that want to dump 20 cookies on you before delivering up anything useful.)

Teenagers also have their own language and regularly adopt words in weird combinations in order to keep parents and other ancient adults out of the loop. Yep. Very much like the web then.

Which is why, frequently, you feel that every article, white paper and blog is running with a very limited vacabulary. Do you remember the early days when it was all ‘super highway’ this and ‘super highway’ that? It wasn’t that long ago that ‘the digital space’ became the synonym for online. If you’re you still using ‘the digital space’ I’d stop now if I were you. It’s so, like, yesterday.

So, where am I going with all this? Well, the big word is currently, in my humble opinion, ‘personas’. If you want to get down with the digital posse you need personas, brand personas, multiple personas… Your digital strategy isn’t worth doo doo unless you’ve got a few personas to back it up.

Don’t get me wrong. I love personas. CDA loves personas. In fact we’ve got a half day internal workshop about them tomorrow (which is why the subject is so front of mind). But personas are not a miracle cure. You can focus the mind wonderfully by using them but you have to ‘employ’ them. It’s not enough to simply have personas on the payroll.

We always talk about your website being your most important and expensive employee. Your website probably costs more to maintain than your CEO but it would be cheap at twice the price.

How many people does you CEO meet in a year? How many times does he, or she, get to truly demonstrate what your brand is?

Your website is out there 24 hours every day, being reached by people all over the world. Hopefully it’s the living embodiment of your brand; demonstrating usefulness to everyone that comes into contact with it. If the previous description doesn’t sound like your organisation’s website, for goodness sake get a grip. You can’t have a rubbish website in the current economic climate.

Well personas should be right up there on the payroll. They should be getting great benefits packages, including top of the range medical insurance. They should have corner offices and every lunchtime the CEO should rush down to get them sushi from that great Japanese restaurant on the next block. Love your personas. But make them work hard.

If created well and treated with respect, personas bring the real world into your organisational netherspace. You can destil the key attributes of hundreds, thousands, millions of your most important users and prospects into a handful of personas. Give them names and faces. Create back stories. Breath life into them. And then AND THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT – listen to what they have to say.

Next time the head of sales (or, even worse, the CEO) goes on a jag about why the current product brochure should be put on the web in its entirety, bring out Don who runs a 3 year old SME on the west coast and has been buying your products since he started. Don recently halved the number of staff in the warehouse and is moving over to JIT. He needs another brochure like he needs a hole in the head.

Or the head of marketing has become obsessed with social networks and wants the entire business promoted in a 3 minute flash movie on MySpace. Bring in Jodie, who was recently nominated for business woman of the year and has a pathological dislike of anything that’s just fallen off the back of bandwagon.

Personas visualise your users and put a pulse behind your empirical and statistical data. You can convene them in a nanosecond and unlike focus groups they don’t need sandwiches at lunchtime, or have their opinions hijacked by a retired SAS officer called Kevin.

But personas must be real. (Okay, they aren’t really real but go with me on this one.) Because personas are so popular agencies are conjuring them up like magician’s rabbits. Abracadabra! There’s your personas. All website ills magically cured. Not.

We’ve been working with personas and feel they only earn their keep if you’ve really worked them through the scenarios that touch your business. Run a few situations. Then run some more. Do your personas stand up? The process is a bit like Second Life but not quite so dorky. That’s really what tomorrow’s workshop is going to be about – working out permutations of personas, scenarios and online positions. Creating a virtual grid that mimics the big picture. This will act as both a test environment and also a way of defining persona work for clients. I’ll let you know how we get on.