magnify360 Blog

Wow! It just keeps getting better and better. Today, magnify360 was named Best-in-Show by VentureNet.

magnify360 was one of thirteen companies carefully scrutinized and invited to present to VentureNet’s audience of over 400 Southern California VC’s, angel investors and fellow technologists. And in spite of the very stiff competition, we won!!

Big congratulations to our ceo, founder and presenter, Olivier Chaine., and the whole team here. Very very well deserved. More updates on this to come.

From the VentureNet Site:

“VentureNet is your one chance to see the most innovative emerging technology companies and entrepreneurs in the Southern California region strut their stuff for venture capital and angel investors.”

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

We had very big day here at magnify360.  This morning we launched a project with Citrix Systems that we’ve been working on in stealth mode for a very long time.  The project is a website, called OneGreatPartner.com, and it’s a site dedicated to fostering the long-standing alliance between Citrix and Microsoft.  Not coincidentally, the site launched on Monday, the first day of Microsoft’s World Wide Partner Conference in Houston, Texas, where every year Microsoft crowns its favorite partner.

The site includes some social networking functionality, private product access and information on current and upcoming Citrix-Microsoft initiatives and is primarily geared towards sales and tech executives at both organizations.  

We integrated the magnify360 Platform to improve visitor engagement and return visits.  Essentially, our platform profiles or analyzes the implicit and explicit behaviors of each user to the site and in real-time serves the most relevant on-site experience to each accordingly.  In the case of OneGreatPartner, the explicit information can include a Microsoft or Citrix exec’s self-published information, like title, group, age and department and implicit data, such IP geo-location, click speed, how long they take to move from one page to the next, etc.  

Real-time customization of the on-site experience includes varying messaging, graphics, media, layout, page flow–you name it.  For Citrix, the greatest bi-product of our solution is the data on what information the Microsoft executives are gravitating towards, to indicate areas of strength, improvement or even to spark new ideas for product and marketing.

SoCalTech was nice enough to write up a brief article about it too: magnify360 Gets Win at Citrix

Read the press release we issued.