The MIT-EF White Board Challenge gives emerging companies and entrepreneurs in the Chicago area an opportunity to give a five-minute presentation on an innovative business concept, with over $5,000 in prizes going to the top three presentations.

There were 67 applications, from which 13 finalists were selected to present at tonight’s event. The finalists showcased innovation from a wide range of technologies, from a better spray bottle to a "smart" electrical outlet that can prevent electrocutions and home fires.

The first prize, $ 3,000 and a business model study from the Coleman Center, valued at $ 1,500 went to the Guardian Angel Outlet, presented by Dan Masterson. Masterson was easily the best presenter of the group. He opened with some “shocking” statistics: 2400 children are treated each year for electric shock. Hundreds of them die. And 3300 household fires start at electric outlets. Masterson presented the “Guardian Angel Outlet”, a “smart” electric outlet.

The Guardian Angel Outlet contains a microprocessor that uses a capacitive sensing technique (Masterson name-checks the iPhone for using this technique). It senses that a hand is near and turns off the power. The outlet can identify safe/unsafe conditions: the nearness of a hand, excess heat, or an arcing situation.

This is the same technology licensed to Fellowes for their Safe Sense shredder, which won the 2007 Chicago Innovation Award and was Fellowes biggest selling item ever. They hold four pending patents on the technology.

They estimate the 16 Million dwellings with children under three years old as being a market that is emotionally ready to purchase their $10 outlets. They are currently negotiating to license the Guardian Angel technology to the top outlet manufacturers.

Second place went to MagDrive, presented by Igor Stamenkovic. MagDrive has patented technology that makes electric motors and generators more efficient. This is basic electric technology: fixed magnets, copper coils and a spinning core. The folks behind the MagDrive used sophisticated physics and numeric analysis to optimize the configuration of the electric motor or generator.

Over 15 million electric motors of varying sizes are sold every day, and the motor/generator components represent a $500 Million per day spend. The MagDrive’s efficiency makes it less expensive to operate. The design is modular and can scale up or down depending on the size and power requirements. The MagDrive component retrofits easily into existing equipment.

What was missing from Stamenkovic’s presentation was a clear statement of how much more efficient the MagDrive is compared to current technologies. I have no idea of the expected savings, or payback period for investing in a MagDrive. Nor was it clear what stage of development the MagDrive has reached.

RevStor, presented by Russ Felker, was the third place winner. RevStor uses existing corporate data resources to build a secure computing cloud on your premises. RevStore ties together an existing network to provide systems management, backup, archive, and security.

This provides an internal alternative to the external “cloud” or “on-demand” computing solutions offered by Google, Amazon, or Seagate; the (antiquated and possibly expensive) tape-based solutions offered by the likes of HP; and the (expensive) SAN solutions offered by the likes of EMC. RevStor shares CPU, storage, and network resources inside an enterprise in a secure managed environment. RevStor was also a finalist in the MIT-EF “Below the Radar” event last month.

The panel of judges for the Chicago MIT-EF White Board Challenge included Raman Chardha from the Coleman Center at DePaul University; Bernadette Freeman, Admin Law Judge from the City of Chicago, Adam Masia, Partner at Bell, Boyd & Lloyd; and Bill Myers, Director of Business Development at Motorola’s Early Stage Accelerator. David Weinstein was unable to attend due to an illness in his family. Attendees were given a vote as well, calling a toll-free number and entering their choice. The attendee votes counted as one judge, and I was told that the crowd choice coincided with the judges’ winner.

That’s the winners in a nutshell. I’ll share my notes on the well-deserving runners-up tomorrow.

Labels: chicago technology, innovation

Time for online marketing analysts in Chicago and elsewhere, and online marketing managers in Chicago and elsewhere, to get ready for the coming hundredfold or more increase in mobile usage. Motorola will tell us they told us so, but I'm guessing Apple's $199 iPhone, and the upcoming Google open-source Android phone, will provide the great usage expansion into profitability of the mobile marketing business.

As the New York Times reported, AT&T will charge $10 more each month than in the earlier contracts. The forecasters at AT&T underestimated how much more Net-centric the iPhone users are than the user of their competitors. And the faster access speeds of the 3G network will probably lead a demand shift.

And to get the most out of that upcoming usage, it's time to get some clues from the early iPhone adopters. How did their click patterns differ? Show those side-to-side click and heat maps to the mobile designers, and see what happens. And what video format will show your other offerings to a lander on a video page in your marketing network.

So, I invite you into the conversation.
Where to start: Look for clues as to interface use in the usage patterns of the existing iPhone user base. How does iPhone browser use differ?

What are you learning about mobile usage of your online content?
How will we need to tune your mobile interface for smoothest interface?
How will we lay out landing pages for a squeeze interface?
Are you testing alternative mobile interfaces? What are you seeing, if you will say? I hope to share some of our findings with you this summer.

Labels: 3G usage, apple $199 iPhone, Google Android, mobile usage analytics, mobile web analytics

Moto CMO Eduardo Conrado spoke to Chicago's Business Marketing Association (BMA), describing how Motorola transitioned from product-focused marketing to solutions, and how interactive marketing was at the center of the transformation.

Eduardo Conrado, is Motorola Corporate VP of Global Marketing & Communication for Business & Technology. He oversees global marketing for three of the four major divisions of Motorola, focusing on the Business-to-Business markets -- hence his speaking to the Chicago BMA's monthly luncheon for B2B marketers. The presentation was dense and broad. This is another long report from me, but potentially rewarding as Conrado is able to give the forty-thousand foot perspective along with specific examples of how his team envisions and implements innovative marketing campaigns.

Conrado has received many accolades for his work at Motorola over the past couple of years as he oversaw a dual shift in Motorola's approach to the market. First, he shifted Motorola's marketing message from one that is product-based to one that is sector and solutions based. Second, he shifted their marketing medium from 80% trade-shows-and-printed-collateral to 50% Internet Marketing, including web with a heavy multimedia component and email.

It is clear that one area where Motorola has excelled in innovating over the past couple of years is in its approach to B2B marketing. The title of Conrado's presentation was "Motorola's B2B Marketing goes Online".

TRANSFORMING MOTOROLA'S B2B MARKETING

Conrado said that this approach to B2B marketing grew out of the Wimax product. His team wanted to find a core insight and compelling idea. They saw a need to deliver their message to their target audience where they want and when they wanted it. They sought to develop innovative content and deliver it around the world. To do this, they needed to use the internet effectively.

Over the past two years, Conrado and his team have undertaken a transformation of B2B marketing, to deliver a consistent message that can be segmented to very specific target markets. They asked themselves "What is the best message?" And began moving from a "high touch" approach with lots of printed collateral to an approach that is very interactive and direct.

This required retooling staff in Motorola's B2B marketing. They were 80% to 90% non-interactive, and they are now "balanced" at 50-50 digital and non. Their approach to developing new marketing messages is to start with interactive and back into the "other stuff". This gives them an opportunity to be agile, testing the response and fine-tuning the message before committing to expensive media production and buy schedules.

Last year they made a commitment - a 50/50 split of online/offline from a single organization and a single agency, BBDO New York. This is in support of $17 Billion in annual revenues. He did mention that a Chicago-based firm, Design Kitchen, played an important role in the development of the approach to Internet Marketing used by Motorola.

HOW MOTOROLA CREATES SOLUTIONS FOR B2B CUSTOMERS

Conrado described Motorola as "an 80-year-old startup," constantly reinventing itself. Today's innovations are focused on the areas of public safety, Home & Network Mobility, Enterprise Mobility Solutions, and Mobile Devices. Their customers are Telecom Carriers, Government & Public Sector (60% direct Motorola business, 40% through distribution channels), and Commercial Enterprise (90% through channel partners and very segmented). To serve these customers and channels, their marketing needs to follow "microsegmentation".

To achieve "microsegmentation" they needed to break with the traditional approach. Motorola's old-school marketing had been product-driven: Create a product and push it into the market. In today's global economy, this approach quickly degrades into price competition.

Now they start with a market segment (industry or service function, like "public safety"), develop a customer profile, define a Motorola-based solution and then fit in products to fill out that solution. Only once a solution that fits a specific customer profile has been created do they begin to look into product details. (I note that once again marketers are looking for the "seamless user experience")

Conrado had some great graphics in his presentation, and he showed the "perspective", or point-of-view taken as the marketing campaign is shaped, as concentric circles, with the "customer segment" at the center, moving outward to "end user", "solution", and finally "products".

BENEFITS OF THE ONLINE CHANEL

Why is Motorola pushing into online marketing? 60-80% of technology buyers use the web as their primary research tool prior to purchase.

Conrado gave the example of car buying, how people go into a dealer well-informed. The same trend occurs, even more so with B2B tech buying. Their team asked "How do we make it easy for our customers to find a solution?" Motorola.com is only one destination. We are competing for time. We have five minutes to make our case online.

85% of business managers turn to Search Engines when they begin the purchase process. In order to compete in this environment, Motorola needed to provide great content and optimize that content for Search Engines. SEO is critical for reaching the B2B audience.

They looked at the web and where people were going for information. Manufacturers sites were held as most influential by B2B customers, followed by distributors' sites and search engines. They began to adapt their content.

By getting distributors to carry and link to their content, they were able to have the presence of Motorola multiplied 20,000-fold. They focused on a line of questioning: "How do we get distributors to deliver our content?" "How can we help 20,000 distributors?" By helping the distributors, they were able to drive more traffic to the Motorola web site. A year ago, Motorola.com had 500,000 visitors per month. This year, it's 1M visitors per month. 25% of those are coming in via search engines.

INTEGRATING ONLINE SKILLS INTO MOTOROLA'S MARKETING FUNCTIONS

The award-winning Motorola marketing mix includes these disciplines:

PR,
Events,
SEO & SEM,
Advertising,
Direct Marketing
They have developed a toolkit to optimize their content. They have a process that is focused on generating revenue and is trackable:

Prospects -> Quality Leads -> Relationship Marketing Database -> Regional go-to-market

Conrado comments that when evaluating content, reach is good, but not great. For him, all marketing needs to have some interactive component. Why? It's engaging, but it's also measurable and can be captured in the CRM Database. All interactive elements are tied to the CRM System for the purpose of microsegmentation.

My comment here: I would observe that the big payback is not so much from tracking what a single user does, but from having aggregate information that lets them profile their most useful messages and series of messages. This gives them knowledge and insight that lets them adjust the messages and deliver the most effective messages to the right people at the right times. Of course, I have a professional interest in how they are staffing for analytics in each of the above areas.

EXAMPLES:
Positioning Motorola's Service Offerings for Public Safety

In the aftermath of 9/11, public safety was top-of-mind. Conrado's team at Motorola looked for ways to meet public safety needs, positioning solutions for the government and public safety sector. "We always look at positioning in sets of three," says Conrado. "This makes the position defendable and ownable."

The positioning statement is created with their agency and they also connect across to other organizations. Working with target customer organizations, they identified a need for real-time data -- responders need information relevant to the situation they are in. They need to get that information into police cards and fire engines. It needs to be "information in the hands of end users", moving seamlessly from data centers to the field.

Motorola's marketers came up with the concept of "technology that's second nature." This gave rise to the three-part positioning for public safety.1) Seamless Connectivity + 2) Real-time information + 3) In the hands of end-users.

Human Factors drive the campaign concept

To craft the solutions that fit this position, Motorola's industrial design team worked with outside consultants High Velocity to identify human factors involved in emergency public safety situations. Their conclusions: In an emergency situation, responders are prone to "tunnel vision". The technology used to get information needs to be intuitive, like second nature.

The question then became one of "how can we create a campaign that brings all of this to life?" By focusing on people -- public safety workers in uniform, they developed four brand attributes that they wanted to be present in the campaign. Trusted, Dynamic, Inventive, Human.

Trusted - Motorola's brand campital, thought leadership and ability to be deployed in mission-critical life-or-death situations.
Dynamic - not as important, technology forward, but not too leading edge as to interfere with "trust".
Inventive - new solutions that are created especially to meet their needs.
Human - Always focused on people. Never show hardware without a person, preferably in uniform. The brand value is not "tech is beautiful", but people + Product = emotional attachment. Bring out the reality of what our customers (end-users) look like.

Refine the Segmentation before creating the campaign

Conrado talked about "microsegmentation", I can''t help but think that micro to $17B Motorola is more like macro to many of the businesses of the people out there who might be reading this.

A dense but well organized slide visualized the microsegmentation concept.

Thought Leadership/Concept: Technology that's second nature.

Vertical Segments: law enforcement, fire/emergency, national defense.

People: CEO, COO, IT/CIO, Elected Officials, Radio Systems Managers

Other Influencers: Companies, Media & Analysts

Products: List of motorola products

He gave a similar slide giving a view into how they approach the enterprise space with solutions. What is impressive here is that they have a formal way of looking at their solution through many lenses. Not many SMBs have the time or resources to perform this kind of formal analysis, so it's nice to have tools like this, to see where there may be gaps in understanding of how companies are talking to and listening to their potential customers.

Implementing the Campaign

Based on the microsegmentation analysis for the Government and Public Safety sector, they designed a campaign. They began by developing and testing online elements: Web Banners and Microsites that with good Search Engine Optimization. They published email newsletters and tested home page promotions on motorola.com. Then they pushed into the print campaign with the best performers.

Print ads in CIO and Fire Chief magazines. They went to events with collateral that leads to a landing page. On the landing pages they present scenarios featuring real people, using lots of CGI. The costs of CGI are substantially less than photo shoots or film production and CGI is quicker to produce, is flexible and adaptable.

The campaign landing page is interactive, playing out six emergency scenarios. It utilizes a 3-D interactive environment showing their products in use by emergency responders. Once the situation is explained, they can talk about products.

Motorola's Online Mix Evolves from Email to Multimedia to 3D CGI

The #1 reason tech buyers visit manufacturer websites is for white papers and case studies. "We wanted to get away from 2-D PDF formats. We wanted to be more exciting and engaging." Working with Chicago-based Design Kitchen, they wanted to go beyond the PDF, the decided to use three minute videos on Motorola's site.

There is now an on-line video library at Motorola's web site. People tend to watch three or four videos back-to-back. Their analytics report lots of nine-minute visits and strong use of the Send to a Friend feature.

With the success of engagement with videos, they undertook to evolve email newsletters. The decided to make their email into a multimedia e-zine sent via email, with Flash embedded in the email. Popular wisdom said it wouldn't work. Conrado characterized the general consensus as "No way!" Riding on the success the multimedia content on their web site was enjoying, they went forward with tests. (Reminds me of Bill Myers comment at MIT-EF about using the capital from a success.)

The results were a 48% open rate for the multimedia e-zine emails vs. an open rate in the low-to-mid 30's previously, and a 17% click-through rate as compared to an 8% standard. The e-zines were another big success.

From the video library to multimedia e-zines, Conrado and his group continued to innovate, looking for ways to make their marketing more engaging. They observed that storytelling capability gets much better in an interactive environment. Their CGI scenario site shows 2-way focuses in to emergency workers with 2-way radios. Comparison buttons play audio, giving a vivid demonstration of what it means to have 30% better audio in a field situation.

They continue to expand their digital marketing with PR, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Digital Press Kits, Case Studies, and even Blogs (so long as they are targeted, interesting,and relevant).

For every segment they pursue, Motorola brings: 1) differentiated positioning; 2) distinct, flexible platforms; and 3) a cutting edge marketing mix. By utilizing on-line media first, Conrado's team is able to gage customer responses to the marketing message and quickly adapt before rolling out a full scale campaign or even components of a campaign. By focusing on real people in real situations, and developing a solution that backs into products, Motorola has become an innovative leader in B2B marketing.

Labels: motorola, solutions marketing

Sometimes the jargon we use makes it more difficult to understand what is actually quite simple. Today on LinkedIn answers, I saw a question from a young woman in Romania. She asked, "

Can you estimate the viral traffic? If so what is the percentage we are talking about?

So, what is "viral traffic"? It's activity arising from viral marketing, which Wikipedia defines as "marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses".

The emphasis on social networks in the Wikipedia answer highlights that these are efforts directed at humans, as opposed to scripts and search algorithms.

So, as we look at visits by referral source, I'll assert that all non-search referrals (with the exception of those from script-driven news sites), can be considered viral traffic.

As to the percentage, it, of course, varies widely, depending on the nature of your site, how often you provide fresh content, how well you uses RSS as a syndication mechanism, how interesting that content is to blog and news sites, and then how well their take on your content incites the readers of the blogs and news sites to follow the link back to your site.

It puts the onus on our content providers to write both for the search engines and for the wholesale syndicators, those bloggers who follow our site and the keywords around which we are writing. But the benefits are great.

But the benefits are great. One of our client content sites just had its second best week of the last year from one very viral story.

Labels: blogs, content creation, RSS, viral marketing, viral referrals

If you are an election junkie, as I am, you've probably seen the election map that CNN's John King manipulates in a manner that conjures another John (Anderton), the homicide detective Tom Cruise played in Minority Report. Jacques Steinberg's NYTimes story about King and his Perceptive Pixel screen, explains that King, a wire service reporter before joining CNN, had difficulty making the transition.

“I’m in TV 10 years , but in my head and heart, I’m still an old wire guy, a grunt,” Mr. King said. “You can use this new technology to look at politics the old-fashioned way, which is: who’s finding their people and turning them out?”"... ...“If all I’m doing is saying, ‘6 percent, 8 percent, 10 percent, 12 percent,’ there’s that glaze-over factor at home. You’ve lost them."

Similarly, in our work, so much is dependent on our clients, the decision-makers, seeing the impact among their users of the efforts of their digital teams: the writers, editors, designers, data and database specialists. "Data visualization" is the umbrella term, capturing the visual, tabular, and verbal methods of communicating what happened.

One of the most basic data visualization tools is the funnel, or sequence report. I can't count the times when a marketer saw the visual representation of the customer or reader flows through a sign-up or shopping cart sequence and knew immediately what to try to improve it: clearer instructions, changing the font style to emphasize one oft-ignored instruction, or a marketing message about the benefits of a completed sequence, to name a few. As we've gotten more sophisticated, showing the funnels for different classes of customers has helped clients tune those important sequences. "The key is to see", and those funnels, like Mr. King's Perceptive Pixel screen, are useful visual tools.

Labels: CNN, data visualization, funnels, John King, Perceptive Pixel

Online publishers: Make the most of content in 2008

AS I've said, Spring is just around the corner and it's spring cleaning time --- including site redesign, editorial refocusing, and email program review --- for several of my publishing clients. For many publishers, usage patterns tend to be relatively consistent during the spring months, and usage is a lot like fall patterns. This makes it a great time to shift from simply publishing to listening closely to the needs of readers. We do this by testing how variations in program, format, and focus lead to improvements in key indicators like uniques, visits, and page views.

If online content is part of your publishing business, then the context in which your content reaches your target audience is critical. Your content can be made more productive by making it available to your readers in multiple contexts. The Chicago Tribune's new “Topic Galleries” are a great example with a double payback: first, more links in news stories lead to better Google scores for those pages with respect to linked terms, and, second, the keyword-rich gallery pages themselves will place well in Google searches.

Don't Call it Data Mining!

OK, it feels like a time to throw out a manifesto and a would-be meme.

Who among you has not heard of IBM researchers finding in British supermarket scanner data a link between purchases of beer and diapers? And who among you has heard of the size of the stream of income that came from this insight?

As I suspected -- these are legendary stories among marketing professionals.

Those of use who practice marketing analytics know that we seek phenomena of a large enough potential value to warrant the time and other resource costs of our work. We don't want nuggets. We want the better seeds, smarter cultivation, the right tuning of exposure. We're farmers, not miners. And so I argue we call it Data Farming, not Data Mining. Don't seek the compressed residual amalgam of ages past. We manage data farms, fields of waving grains of truth, plants that yield fruit.

As a case, I'll follow the growth of the meme "Data Farming" on web sites NotDataMining.com and DataFarming.net. No, I don't have DataFarming.com, but that lack provides us a market tracking metric. DataFarming.com was offered for $2488.00 on GoDaddy.com as of Sunday night, February 17, 2008. The asking price is an imperfect but useful market metric on the value of this meme. We'll follow it as we go.

Ken Novak, Chief Analytics Officer, Metrist Partners: Chicago data farmers since 2000.

Parsing the opportunity in site redesign

It's site redesign time for several of my content clients, and a great time to place our bets as to where to put test site improvements and program improvements.
When we redesign, we are not merely trying to make our pages prettier, we are testing to find what can be made more productive by changes to program, format, or focus.
Now's the time -- use the spring months, when usage patterns for most content sites are fairly regular, to push out some tests. How much content can your readers handle in heavy-interest time periods, like the run-up to or follow-up from a convention or conference? Can you better ride the wave of of product or service introductions? Or are there stories that spring from industry personalities or product/campaign mis-steps as people position themselves and their new products.

Elements to test: Program, Format, Focus

By program I mean the contact schedule, from broadcast to user-specific communications by way of RSS and e-mail. Chances are there are additional e-mail programs that will find a loyal readership. Our client Advertising Age has just inaugurated a new newsletter to support the strong content in their CMO Strategy section.

Focus is subject line and headline work. What is the best language to sell the story to your Internet-based audience? What do you want to be on the Google, Yahoo or MS news feed from your story? Which approaches get more blogger and social network juice?

Format is how everything else is laid out for the visitor in emails and landing pages, resulting on more time-on-page, more additional page views, and more refer-a-friend clicks. As usability guru Jakob Nielsen reiterated in January, usability redesigns are still averaging an 83% improvement in key volume indicators. The low-hanging fruit may be gone, but there is still much fruit to be gathered. We recommend setting aside 10% of your re-design budget for analysis to target redesign to the highest ROI site elements.

What are you planning on changing this spring? How are you planning on measuring the results of those changes?

Labels: content, metrics, publishing, web analytics

SEO - Duplicate Content, when employees blog...

A recent email from a client asked about handling duplicate content:

I know that having duplicate copy is bad but I'm wondering if I can get away with two things:

1. One of our high-tech gurus wants to update his personal blog and have me copy or syndicate the post on our company blog. I have added links and for key words I change his spelling. Will Google ding us if I copy the content of his blog?

2. I would like to set up a wordpress blog and use the copy from our company blog to feed it. My thought is that a blog hosted outside of our website and linked extensively might help us. However, this might cause us problems if Google dings for repeat content issues.

Metrist response:

Suppose we look this question from Google's point of view? They don't want to end up with the same article showing up multiple times on a search engine results page.

By the same token, you will dilute the effectiveness of your linking strategy if you publish the same material in several places. If I'm a blogger and I want to link to your story, to whom should I link? You end up with your own pages being spoilers for building link strength.

While it may be a good idea to utilize the community benefits of publishing on WordPress (or Blogger, etc.), you can get the same effect by putting your corporate blog articles on an RSS Feed from Feedburner, with strong headlines and good relevant meta tags. We have a couple of clients using Feedburner and they were very satisfied with the results. Their content got blogged faster and more often than before.

The issue of your Guru's personal blog + corporate presence is potentially problematic. Ultimately, I'd recommend that it work like Matt Cutts, from Google. He's a Google Employee who blogs independently. Occasionally the Google webmaster blog will summarize a relevant posting from Cutts and point back to Cutts' blog. Essentially you would blog on the Corporate blog about what cool stuff Guru is blogging about, using your keywords to link back to his articles. This also lets you frame what he's talking about in terms of your keywords without having to fight with him about using your chosen language framework. And by "fight", I mean cajole, flatter, remind, and suggest.

Now, it turned out that Matt Cutts weighed in on duplicate content SEO the next day. Cutts responds to a question from a presentation at one of the SES conferences:

I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site. However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.
We use additional heuristics of course, but I figured other people might want to hear that take.

Labels: duplicate content, seo

Google Analytics sponsors Web Analytics Wednesday in Chicago in February

Web Analytics Wednesday in Chicago, which my esteemed colleague Avery Cohen has been organizing since 2006, has a special sponsor, Google, in February. WAW-Chi is always a lively discussion, and we you to join us (use the link above).