magnify360 Blog

What a great week for all of us at magnify360! Last Tuesday we announced that magnify360 closed its first round of financing from MHS Capital as well as from some of the original investors behind successes, like BlueLithium (Yahoo!), Right Media and BetterPPC. Read the press release.

Congrats to the team!

A little history on magnify360. The Company was founded in 2004 by  Olivier Chaine. With the dedication of few of the original team members here, he bootstrapped the company to profitability within two short year, opened another office in Shanghai, China and attracted the likes of clients, including Citrix Systems, Intuit, Service Magic (IAC), HSBC Bank, Packet8, Continental Warranty and other industry leaders. Might I add, our very first clients are still with us today.

The financing will predominantly focus on recruiting—we are growing fast-fast-fast. All of our available positions are here. Take a look, polish your resume and send it on in.  We’re on the hunt for bright, creative and quick minds.

The media coverage of our announcement was tremendous. magnify360 was featured in:

DowJones VentureWire

VentureBeat (BIG thank you to Matt Marshall)

SoCalTech

The blog of Ben Kuo, voice of SoCalTech (Thank you Ben!)

The Smart Show (contributed by Fransisco Dao of the FastCompany blog)

TechCrunchIT (What an honor! Thank you Cameron!)

PaidContent

Pulse2.0

…and many many other fantastic & well-respected outlets. Thanks to everyone, who covered the announcement. All can be viewed on the News section of www.magnify360.com.

While all of this was going on, Olivier was flying around the country delivering speeches at the Online Marketing Summit Summer Tour…Seattle, Denver, Atlanta…not to mention meetings in San Fransisco and back here in LA and our exhibit this week at San Jose’s Search Engine Strategies conference.

In between flights on layovers and in between meetings in the car, he was on the phone taking interviews. You see…Olivier doesn’t sleep. He’s an optimization machine.

magnify360 is one of the sponsors of the current Online Marketing Summit’s Summer Tour.  The events runs through September at various cities across the country.  Here is an update from the Boston stop on the tour.

Aaron Kahlow, the founder of OMS kicked things off with a presentation geared to wake us up, literally!  He mentioned that organizations continue to hit the “snooze button” on the alarms going off around online marketing and do not continue to invest or reinvent themselves on the web.

Throughout the day, the sessions centered on topics such as search engine marketing, analytics and user experience, email marketing, social media strategies, demand generation, multi-channel metrics as well as behavioral targeting and technology.  Each session contained valuable insights for both the novice and experienced online marketers attending.

A highlight of the day was the keynote panel, when the attendees got to ask their industry peers direct questions about the state of online marketing. The topic this time was how big brands were driving success through social media, SEO, SEM, websites and testing.  A recurring theme for the panelists was the need to increasingly personalize and humanize the online experience.  They also enforced the need for analytics, and suggested that organizations use existing social networks to their benefit, instead of recreating the wheel with their own brands.

Be sure to check out the OMS website for more information or to register for one of the upcoming tour stops.

magnify360’s ceo and founder, Olivier Chaine, has been invited to participate as a panel member at the upcoming Online Market World (OMW) conference in San Francisco, this coming October 1-3.

He’ll be on two panels, one of which is entitled The Seven Deadly Sins of Website Design. Working with the producer, Lisa Morgan, we were asked to provide a few of the top line sins we’d like covered during the discussion.

Even to our own surprise, our primary suggestion had very little do with this business’ core functions: personalization, behavioral targeting, multivariate testing, analytics, lead scoring, pURLs or predictive modeling—none of it. Instead, our main contribution focused on marketing culture.

The biggest sin of website design is the idea that a website is a project with a beginning, middle and end. Instead, a website should be perceived as a living entity, requiring continual nurturing. At magnify360, we refer to this as Continual Marketing, and we practice this by updating our own website and those of our clients each and every day.

Sometimes, this is the roll-out of a big flashy update but most days, it’s just a small test and improvement to a button color, a brief re-write to a paragraph or a small tweak to how website resources are managed—baby steps to overall progress. Generally, these updates take only a few minutes but added together produce enormous results.

This idea is based on the Japanese practice of Kaizen or Continual Improvement, which dictates that large-scale pre-planned project scheduling should be replaced by smaller experiments, which can be rapidly adapted to produce large-scale results. It’s also a focus on the method, rather than the goal.

Borrowing from Kaizen, because there is no such thing as the perfect website, there is no end goal, just a continuous series of small improvements, implemented every day for overall improvement. The benefits of adopting this type of approach include:

-  Time & Resource Efficiency

-  Far Less Risk in Launches

-  Ability to Measure Results in an Uncluttered Environment

-  Encouragement of Creative, Out-of-the-Box Ideas & Experiments

-  A Company Culture in Which No One Fears Failure

More coverage on the DMDays Conference & Expo and magnify360 from the British Computer Society.

A great summary of this year’s theme, Shift Happens, in Circulation Management Magazine.

Across the board, improving the customer experience was a big focus at this year’s conference (woot-woot!).

Seattle. Coffee. Seahawks. Rain. Mariners. Microsoft. SMX Advanced 2008…

The members of the magnify360 team have returned from SMX Advanced in Seattle!  We were excited to meet new friends, network with our colleagues, and enjoy the weather.

Our booth:

The sessions were very educational.  If you missed the event, the folks at Regency Interactive did a great job putting together links to articles and recapping the various sessions:

Recap of SMX Advanced - day one

Recap of SMX Advanced - day two

We are looking forward to the next one!