magnify360 Blog

Ever wonder why the rearview mirror on the passenger side of your car is distorted?

As the driver, your eye is further away from it. In order for you to still see the images, the mirror is given a convex shape, which shrinks the reflection. The images are there, but they’re not exactly accurate. 

The same can be said for behavioral targeting and web site optimization. With traditional multivariate testing, you can look back on results to see what made your traffic convert, but the data has been distorted with a little thing called time. 

The investment community puts it succinctly: past performance is no guarantee of future results. I like to say, “The right experience for yesterday isn’t necessarily the right experience for right now.” 

Your customer base is constantly changing. Just because a certain landing page performed the best last month or even last week doesn’t mean it’s going to be relevant to your existing flow of visitors.

Take social media, for example. It’s extremely dynamic, with a high volatility over winning pages. This begs the question: how can an online marketer effectively adapt to these constant changes?

Again, we come back to time. REAL time. To ensure the best performing page is always being served, you must be able to evaluate an individual in the moment, and predict what’s most relevant to them.

It all goes back to the driver’s seat. Ask yourself: are you staring at the rearview, looking back at past results? Or are you facing forward, shifting gears and preparing for the curves ahead…

 

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.”

 

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.