Great advice as usual! There was an area where I can add value to your post. You said:

“See exactly how well your competitors are doing with your personas. Take your personas through their site. Be brutally honest.

For each persona, note where your competitors do well and where they fail. In some cases, you’ll find they do better with one or two of your personas.”

One of the things we offer with Semanticator ( http://www.semanticator.com ) is knowledge of which competitors the representatives from each of your personas have visited. As an example, we are currently working on detecting, upon arrival, an “Event Planner” persona for a large hospitality company. The initial experience with our client’s websites will be altered based on the level of commitment to any of the named competitors. So, if they only looked at the “Meetings & Events” section, they will be welcomed by an initial page that has a 30% to 50% focus on meeting planning. However, if they go deeper, say complete a request for proposal form and reach a thank you page on a competitor’s website, we will increase the focus on meeting planning to the 70%-90% range. This approach is resulting in radically reduced bounce rates.

If you are following me here, we will now know which of your personas are visiting which of your competitors. A measure of how successful you are with each persona might be comparative close rates within a persona across an array of competition. We even allow our clients to go beyond the Web and follow visitors whom have visited a particular competitive threat and match a particular persona offline. We are working with a large transportation/storage company to detect visitors that have visited a strong competitor. Not only will the home page change to brace against this competitor, the universal 800 number will also change. This enables the call center representatives to position our client’s products and services vis-á-vis that competitor. And, our client can now track purchase behavior associated with that competitor offline as well.

I thought you might find this approach, enabled by our patent pending Semanticator technology, useful as companies like ours attempt to advance the application of personas in modern marketing.

Then feed that input into product marketers, copywriters, and web folks to plan site updates. Best of all, it’s a great way to remind folks that websites/content aren’t static–they must always be growing and adjusting to the market.