magnify360 Blog

What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger. ~T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

We change. Constantly. Every experience, big or small, alters who we are, and our frame of mind in any given situation. So as marketers, how do we effectively understand such a moving target? Demographics can offer up objective facts - person X lives in the midwest and recently bought a truck - but the bigger question remains elusive and unanswered - WHY did they buy it? What was their headspace in that precise moment that led them to the purchase? 

Let’s look at another example. It’s late in the afternoon and a young businesswoman, needing a distraction after a long meeting, decides to peruse the sales section of her favorite online retailer. She doesn’t get paid for another week, so she doesn’t intend to buy anything right now, but picturing herself in that new sundress puts her in a good mood.

When she gets home that evening, she’s pleasantly surprised by a substantial tax refund, and immediately thinks of the dress. She goes back to the retailer, selects the dress, and with the unexpected money burning a hole in her pocket, adds shoes and a matching handbag to her shopping cart. 

These behavioral changes are subtle, yet powerful. Many solutions attempt to test behavioral attributes in an effort to better understand intent, but as you can see from the example above, unless the data is captured in real-time, it’s already outdated. This is where magnify360 steps in.

Our Predictive DNA technology is able to analyze attitudes, motivations, personality characteristics and belief systems in the moment, at the micro level. It gets in the headspace of every single visitor,  identifies their psychographic DNA, if you will, to present them with a truly unique browsing experience.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Predictive DNA serves as a closed-loop research engine. It’s smart technology that learns from a person’s on site behavior; adapting content, page layout and flow to offer up only the most optimized experience for who the person is in the moment.

Just like you. Over the course of reading this, your mood may have shifted, you may be getting hungry, your phone might be ringing, you’re about to face heavy traffic… People change. 

In ending, Ancient Greek Philosopher Heraclitus said it best. “No man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Any good marketer knows the sensitivities around gathering visitor data. At magnify360, we offer a true one-to-one Web browsing experience by analyzing and responding to a person’s site activity in real time. This behavioral information makes it possible for us to understand a person’s motivation for accepting a call to action.

Due to the nature of our work, privacy and security are consistently at the forefront of everything we do, and we take every action possible to ensure user data is never compromised. We are happy to announce that as of this writing, magnify360 has passed the stringent privacy and data protection requirements of eTrust and has been awarded the organization’s Privacy Certification. This seal validates our strict policies for the following:

Information Collection and Use
magnify360 informs the users of our site if we are collecting information directly from their electronic systems by means such as IP addresses and Cookies.

magnify360 also lets users know why you are collecting information from them.

Information Sharing and Disclosure
magnify360 informs users whether or not we sell or rent their personally identifiable information to anyone.

Security
magnify360 ensures the sensitive information on our site is password-protected for the privacy and security of our users.

To read magnify360’s complete Privacy Policy, visit http://www.magnify360.com/m360/privacy.html

I recently spoke with Damian Joseph from BusinessWeek’s Innovation & Design team about the ways in which Web sites have (or haven’t) evolved, and how letting your visitors design your site can transform it into a revenue generating machine.

Check out the full story on the NEXT blog: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2009/02/chamelionic_web.html

Thanks again, Damian. 

Everyone: what are your thoughts on effectively leveraging your Web site to impact overall company revenues? Will 2009 be the year of conversion optimization? Send me your thoughts via Twitter: @ollie360.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how recruiting has changed over the last 6 months, from the little things to the big things.

Everyone always looks to talent, and reads thousands of resumes to find “talent”. Just because people put down a list of things they’ve done in the past, doesn’t mean they’re talented. “Involved in a team that generated lots of positive ROI” generally means that the company’s profits increased when they laid off the poor bastard.

Then we looked for drive and teamwork, because we knew that raw talent wasn’t enough. So we invented great questions like “are you a good team player?” (hate to meet the person who said no), and “what’s your favorite team sport” (rugby, because most of the team has their head up the hooker’s ass).

Chris Lyman, Fonality’s CEO/Janitor talked about measuring caring in an interview…. with the obvious harassment suit repercussions…. His comments inspired me to think more about how to measure all of the “intangibles” in an interview process. Because my shareholders will tell you I’ve done a lot of trial and error in this realm.

Last week I had one the of the best interviews ever. This guy was coming in as a senior level technical developer / architect, and after a quick set of introductions, he began grilling me, the CEO & Founder, about the company, our technology roadmap, what our customers were saying, where our biggest challenges were, what we were going to do with the company, etc…

This guy CARES. He doesn’t care about making a good impression on me. He doesn’t care about laying roses where I walk or about his specific job description. He CARES about the company that he’s going to join, not politics, perks, and position.

He didn’t care about what part of the code he would be working on. He didn’t care about how many people he could manage. He didn’t care whether the sodas were free (they are), or if the foosball table is broken (it is), or…

Why? Because he CARES about where the company is headed. He cares to know what kinds of challenges the company is facing. He cares what kind of team he is joining. And in the end, he knows that being part of a company that he CARES ABOUT is more important than a title of CEO or Janitor.

After 30 minutes of his questions, I learned far more about him than if I had used that time to ask him about his favorite hobbies or which programming languages he knew. Most importantly, I knew that if I put the company (or whatever small part of the company) in his hands, he would always put the company first in making his decisions. Not what he felt like doing. Not what I wanted. But what was best for the company.

The following is my reaction to the latest letter from Jason Calacanis, founder of Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs, Inc., and Mahalo.com. He’s also an avid blogger at www.calacanis.com. To subscribe to his mailing list, visit https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/jason

Jason -

Excellent letter. Definitely some deep thoughts in this one.

This isn’t just a phenomenon in the online world, and removing oneself from the online world itself doesn’t cure IAS. Look at the daily news on CNN, Fox, any channel. Everything and everyone has an agenda, and is willing to dehumanize the rest of the world to get ahead and accomplish their agenda.

Is it the Internet? Is it TV? Is it the breakdown of ‘family values’? Is it the Suburb-based car-driving culture? Ultimately it all contributes to the same isolation of the world. Why are communities where people walk to the corner store usually safer? It’s awfully hard to hide when everyone knows your name. It’s a lot harder to flip someone off on the freeway when you might see them at the office, in the parking lot, at the grocery store. But in a city of 20M people, with sound proof, climate-controlled, isolated cars, what are the chances?

Just in writing this, I’ve seen headlines like “Freedom Under Fire”, “Stimulate This!”, “Lou’s Line Item Veto”, … And this is supposed to be from CNN… “the most trusted source for news”. Slow-mo shots with completely bogus headlines. Shameless self-promotion. And this is on mute.

Hype & sensationalism. It’s a land grab for people’s attention, driving up adrenaline by pitting one person against the next. It’s the two party system at its worst. It’s the winner-take mentality that doesn’t consider the human cost.

At the risk of being flamed, has anyone studied history? Hitler was Time magazine’s man of the year, because he brought people together on a platform of nationalism, reform and by quashing all debate. Instead of engaging in healthy dialog, we call everyone we disagree with a Nazi, Communist or, more recently, a terrorist. Airport security too long? Must be a Nazi. Don’t like your coffee today? The barista must be a terrorist. And the coffee beans are funding terrorism… Throw them all in a “camp” to “protect all of us”. How much more ridiculous can we get?

A man in LA murdered his family and committed suicide because he lost his job and fell into despair. There were headlines calling this “domestic terrorism”. How much more ridiculous can we get?

Squashing dissent and debate aren’t healthy. This country was founded by people who were escaping exactly that type of government, culture and intolerance. It’s exactly the respect for different opinions, multiple political views, religion, etc… that creates strong societies. While it is the natural progression of societies to get caught up in the strength of their leaders, their difference, their dominance in military and economic power, they quickly forget that their cultural dominance exists only in their minds, long forgotten in the intolerance for different views that were the core of their foundation.

Fall of the Roman Empire, anyone?

So to all those who espouse bigotry, against races, genders, religion, or new ideas, there is nothing we can do to stop you. But your words and your actions bring us all down.

Do the negative comments affect me? Sure. Does my thick skin protect me? Not a chance.

Kathy Sierra felt it and checked out. Mike Arrington felt it and checked out. You felt it and (held back). I’ve felt it. The only response that keeps you sane is to either check out, or dismiss _everyone_ as “crazy and irrational”.

Olivier

ps. I heard that the first rule of surviving as a celebrity is “never read the papers”. Unfortunately this is true online as it is in the movies.

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend Mixergy’s Conversion Forum last Friday night. @AndrewWarner can certainly pack a house, and this event was no exception. Thanks also to my contemporary, Tim Ash for providing his thoughts on landing page optimization, and to Jason Nazar of @DocStoc for skillfully warming up the crowd.

Speaking of DocStoc, if you were unable to attend Mixergy or are like me and can’t read your own handwriting, don’t fret. You can download my complete presentation on DocStoc here:http://is.gd/hkZJ In it, you’ll learn common landing page mistakes, best practices for conversion optimization, and other tips for maximizing your online marketing campaigns.

I also spoke with Andrew earlier last year about how to increase your site’s conversion rates now. To hear the interview, click here:http://is.gd/hl4p

Definitely off topic for my usual online marketing rants, but this post by Dave Caolo on “Kitchen Computing” really caught my attention.

I can remember going to countless past CES shows touting the internet enabled refrigerator… And it looks like its still coming back over and over again.

Am I the only one who has looked at these things and said “WTF?”. I really don’t want to make the decision on which fridge I buy based on whether it has a substandard computer installed in it. Do I care if it can see that I’m out of milk? I can probably just as easily hit the “OUT OF MILK” button that into on my computer that is sitting 4 feet away, put it in my iphone, or maybe, just maybe we could “Bluetooth Enable” all the milk cartons…. Are we really that lazy?

What I really want is a simple table, maybe even small laptop (13″ is fine) that sits on the kitchen counter, where I can look up recipes for “Jills-World-Famous-Coffee-Liqueur-Brownies”, catch the google news update, watch anderson cooper on AC360, and maybe even, just maybe, remember the milk.

Dave’s post http://bit.ly/1zO6W2 reminded me that there have been lots of attempts to do this right, but none so far that has come even close to the mark. My trusty ibook G4 is sitting on the kitchen counter right now, doing exactly this.

What’s your kitchen computing solution? Post a comment or drop me an email.

Great article by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch….

Bureaucracy, checks and balances, and all the rest. Its the fear of mistakes and taking risks that kills innovation more than anything else.

http://bit.ly/m3X9

Coming from the question of how are people born with innovation and entrepreneurship, Joe Costello, CoFounder and CEO of Cadence Design Systems, once said that he thought every country has the same number at birth, but that most countries / cultures beat it out of their children before they ever have a chance.

How much does conformity cost a company or our whole country? Its huge. I’ve seen the difference when our team members feel empowered to take risks, and the output it both great and scary at the same time.

Imagine if everyone had to ask for permission before taking action on their best ideas.. How much would get done? Nothing. And in this economy we’re seeing way too many people slowing down their pace, making sure they have *sses covered by getting their bosses approval, and not taking risks. “You couldn’t get fired for buying IBM.”

But what will turn around this economy? A huge change back to an irrational but measured risk taking…

More on that in a future post…

Your comments, thoughts on this? Is innovation nature or nurture? Are governments and company over-reactions causing more harm that good?

Olivier
CEO & Founder, magnify360

Without a doubt, Google has changed the way we live our lives. Whether searching for information, shopping for shoes or comparing deals on your next vacation, there is hardly a time when we don’t just Google it.

While this cultural transformation came on fast, it didn’t come by accident. Since its inception, Google has strived towards one goal and one goal only (and no, it’s not refraining from being evil) and that goal is informational relevance.

It’s this relevance that has made Google the world wide hub for information, shopping, email and all things online. However, this dominance brings with it some pretty unique challenges. How do you stay one step ahead of the marketers looking to game the system to win a lion’s share of traffic for their site? How do you prevent spammers? In general, how do they stay one step ahead and keep everyone pursuing Google’s Holy Grail of informational relevance and premium user experience?

The answer is both simple and quite complex.

Google’s constant optimization and an obsessive commitment to user experience are simple. However, the way that this is executed upon is quite complex.

At the heart of this complexity is Google’s algorithm or the way that they measure relevance. It is a semi – black box mix of information rankings, taking many items into consideration. Keyword density in relation to the search query, URL naming conventions, overall performance and too many other factors to name here, all play into how pages are served when the user queries a search.

It’s this constant pursuit of the perfect experience that has kept Google modifying this algorithm and kept marketers, almost obsessively, asking what is the next step in the progression?

In a recent release, Google is saying that now, their quality score will be calculated in real time, dynamically every time a query is made.

So, it appears that the answer would not only be HOW the quality score is calculated, but HOW OFTEN. I guess it’s only logical. As technology continues to increase, and marketers continue to increase their savvy, this is another way for Google to raise the bar.

This new shift in the process is huge. As marketers scramble to figure out Google’s newest riddle, the firms providing real-time landing page optimization and behavioral targeting will become a marketing necessity.

If you’re landing pages are not providing relevance in real-time, your quality score will decline, along with your ranking and ROI, not to mentioned that your CPC will increase.

So, while real-time optimization is definitely “web 2.0” it may soon be the standard. When looking back at how fast Google went from being a new, boutique search engine to a business and cultural cornerstone, it is easy to envision these real-time optimizers as being another mandatory tool in the web marketers arsenal.