These past months we have been busy behind the curtains.  One of our projects is NextStage Sentiment Analysis that I briefly presented at eMetrics Washington last year and we’re currently beta testing it.

What will be in NextStage Sentiment Analysis?

Currently, NSSA is a set of reports providing qualitative information about a text.  From the first feedbacks we have received, it looks like people really like it as it is very insightful and different from what is currently done in this field.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, our aim is not to crawl the web and provide you with results of thousands of posts or comments, but to provide you with very accurate and detailed information about a piece of text.

If you want to see some of the reports that will be available, please read Joseph’s last post on the subject.  He not only explains the reports but also provides a clear example by analyzing one of his earlier posts.

At this stage we want to receive feedback and see how people from different industries and backgrounds react to it, so we’re considering adding a few more testers.  If you’re interested, please contact me and I’ll see if we can include you in this beta program.  Please note that the current version only works with American English content.

Cheers,

René

I promised that I would explain the way we define and classify Personae at NextStage (or personas as some people tend to write it), so here it goes.

NextStage uses Rich Personae^TM since the early 90s when Joseph started developing NextStage’s Evolution Technology. We currently have for AmerEnglish 144 main different personae in our current toolsets, but we usually use 72 and they can be translated into Myers-Briggs equivalents classification. For the moment, we’ve identified over 500 in Europe and over 325 in Asia.

The way we define them is not like most design agencies or marketing departments tend to do this ‘the hockey mum’ or ‘Joe the plumber’, and then explain how these people are supposed to be. Our terminology in comparison is rather boring; we will speak about people who are A3 or V5 for example as they are based on science and not on feelings. Our tools use Rich Personae which not only have traits and attitudes but also rich explanations of why those traits exist such as:

• why their attitudes are their attitudes;
• how to change them;
• how they make decisions;
• what makes them remember this thing and not that thing;
• why and when they’ll buy this and not that
• etc…

But let me give you an example of what I’m talking about, I think it will be much clearer to you:

Let’s take a look at Rich Personae V15, here you’ll find a non exhaustive description of what NextStage can say about this Persona as they

• make decisions based on what they see (pictures, charts and graphs are strong influencers)
• focus on issues and/or items which are personally uncomfortable to them (especially in the information presented)
• tend to think of things as absolutes (either black or white with no shades of gray or no middle ground)
• keep their own counsel before seeking confirmation/information from others. This counsel will revolve around what is personally uncomfortable to them and nothing else. When counsel is sought from others it will be to confirm what has already been determined will go wrong.
• have a strong belief that something will definitely go wrong and worry because they don’t know what will go wrong, when or where it will be
• have a poor sense of time or involvement
• have a poor or little sense of how things get done (because they tend to think in absolutes, either something isn’t done or it is, nothing can be “half way to completion” or be “in process”, for example)
• tend to dismiss and/or ignore arguments/discussions in which time-factors or process-factors are involved
• tend to become confused when time-factors or process-factors are demonstrated as imperative to a decision, and will probably avoid making a decision until the time-factors and/or process-factors are removed from the discussion
• are more apt to believe in a negative statement than a positive statement
• are more apt to accept negatively stated information than positively stated information

As you see we try to provide information that’s actionable for your design and marketing purposes. Just as an example of how to market to this Rich Persona: you will be more successful if your claim incorporates a negative term rather than a positive: “No washing powder is better than ours” rather than “Our washing powder is better than all others”.

You will find Rich Personae in almost all of our future products. For instance in NextStage Sentiment Analysis we will provide you with the Rich Persona that has written the analyzed text as well as the one that the content best targets to and the one that might most be turned off by it.

At NextStage we can also help you define which Rich Personae you should target depending upon your product offering and target audience. We are working on future products to allow this, and in the mean while, we can provide this through our consulting services.

As always, comments and questions are welcome

Cheers,

René

Another tool we’re working on is a tool intended for HR departments. We believe that it would best fit within the offering of a Job Site (eg. Monster) or headhunters.

What does NextStage Resume Reader do?

You can upload a resume in digital format (eg. word document) and our engines will analyze it. Our tool will provide you with a benchmark on 6 variables for the moment:

• Ability to Help
• Works well with others
• Requires Little Supervision
• Reliable
• Trustworthy
• Competent

The screenshot that we present is one of the resumes that we have received at NextStage benchmarked against a 100 others.

How should this tool be used?

You may use it for instance if you have many candidates that look alike and you would like to narrow down your selection before the face to face interviewing process.

Nowadays, for a particular job you may end up with hundreds (if not more) resumes on your desk and it’s not easy to decide which ones will make it to the short list for interviews.  You may discard a good candidate for the wrong reasons.

NextStage Resume Reader helps you make this first selection on a more objective basis, depending of course on your objectives.  The variables that we show in this report are the ones that we have already coded, but others are possible depending upon needs.

Why do we say that a Job site or headhunters would be the best candidate to use this tool?

Job sites have in their possessions thousands and thousands of resumes, it would then be most efficient to use this tool in this environment to get the most accurate benchmarking.  Also this would reduce the cost for HR as it would be a feature proposed within their services, avoiding HR departments to have to use this tool themselves.

Therefore, if you’re a Job site responsible or a headhunter and would like to learn more about this product, don’t hesitate to contact me.

As always, comments and questions are welcome.

Cheers,

René

This is a reminder of the product announcements and expected launch that were made in October at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC.

NextStage OnSite (NSOS)

NextStage OnSite (NSOS) was introduced during a two minutes vendor line-up.
NSOS allows you to better understand who’s coming to your website and how they feel about your communication. NSOS additionally provides recommendations to improve the effectiveness of your website. The product will be released in Q1 2010, definite dates will be communicated through this Blog and via Twitter.
The results of the Independent test proving accuracy in predicting age and gender of online visitors to a website rendered by Evolution Technology (ET) was presented. We believe ET will change the paradigm of Web Analytics and Digital Marketing as we know it today as it provides unique reports about your visitors and automatic recommendations for improvement based on Rich Personae that can not be rendered by any other existing tool.
For more information,

• Download the Free White Paper explaining the test
• Watch the video of the presentation at eMetrics San Jose
• Read about a few of the reports available by reading this post and this post

NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI)

The Alpha version of NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI), our first available product, was introduced during a 10 minutes presentation at the summit. NSAI will be released before the end of Q4 2009.
NSAI allows you to upload any marketing material (print ad, website, newsletter, …) and get best fit audience information and hidden messages of your communication.
Pricing is set at 39.95$ per single use as we want all people to be able to use our technology thus we have decided to price it very reasonably. Bundles will be made available in order to foster optimization, please contact us for more information.
Note that this product will be available only for the U.S. market in its first version as it is language dependent: it feeds on the language used within the digital communication to extrapolate age and gender compatibility, amongst other data points. Expect other languages to be rolled-out in the near future.
Read about some reports that will be available in NextStage Advertising Intelligence here.

NextStage Sentiment Analysis (NSSA)

At the end of the presentation, another product was revealed: NextStage Sentiment Analysis (NSSA), which will also be launched in Q1 2010.
This product will provide you with qualitative information about a writer’ sentiment (eg. blogger) thus not crawling the web in search of positive, negative or neutral mentions of your brand.
One of the reports that will be introduced is what we call internally the ‘BullShit Meter’. This report allows you to know if the writer believes what he’s writing, or not.
Please note that this is an internal name for the report. Don’t hesitate to share your ideas about how we should name it in order to be more politically correct.
NSSA will allow you to upload or point to any material (eg. a blog post), providing you with qualitative sentiment analysis information about it.

————

This was a brief glimpse of what NestStage Analytics has been working on over the past months. I hope that you are as excited as I am about our upcoming products. As always don’t hesitate to send us your feedback and specific requests: we are out rolling slowly and surely what we believe to be useful products for the community and welcome any comments or questions you might have. Thank you.

Exploring collaboration possibilities between NextStage Analytics and Web Analytics vendors.

NextStage has worked in the field of Web Analytics, however differently and complementary to what others such as Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Unica, etc…

NextStage OnSite (NSOS), the product we will be launching next year, is a tool giving you complimentary reports that Web Analytics tools don’t provide.  Or as Dennis from Yahoo! likes to call it data points

First: what does NextStage OnSite do and how?

On a technical level, we incorporate a unique JavaScript tag on your website, also called plain vanilla tag.  The JavaScript is exactly the same on every page, you only have to make sure that it’s placed on every page you want us to track.

Once the code is inserted and if you have a valid account, our systems gather data, loads of it!  Don’t worry, this is completely transparent and non intrusive for you and your visitors.  What do we track?  Mouse movements of your visitors and they keyboard strokes (not what they’re typing but when).

We provide reports and recommendations (regarding recommendations see my second PS at the bottom).

What reports does NextStage provide?

I already explained some in earlier posts as age and gender or the Tirekickers report. Let me give you a few more:

Failure pages

Web analysts often look at Exit pages: “From which pages are my visitors leaving the site?“.

If it’s your eCommerce thank you page, very good, but this is usually not the case.  Exit pages are often not the issue and let me tell you why.  If you’re on a website and you’re looking to buy something (or looking for support), you will start looking around, searching or navigating.  After a few minutes (or seconds if you’re impatient) you’ll start getting frustrated because you can’t find it… But if you really want/need to find what you’re looking for you’ll continue searching.  In the end you give up and you leave the website.  Was your exit page the cause of your frustration?

No, your frustration came before, and current Web Analytics tools can’t know that as they measure clickstream data.  NextStage analyzing how the visitor is thinking while browsing the site, can see when he’s getting frustrated and reports upon, what we call, failure pages.

Failure pages are the pages that create frustration to your visitors and by having this information, you’ll know where to put your optimization efforts.  You might want to rethink those pages, do some A/B testing to see if you can improve them.  I’ve been in the WA Industry long enough to know that most end users struggle in the action part of optimization and often it’s because they simply don’t know where to start.  This report allows you to learn what you really need to optimize.

Here you have an example of this report from our prototype (notice the date?). In this example you see very clearly that 1 page is a huge failure page (red bar) and another one would benefit some revisiting (yellow bar).  With this report you can easily decide where to test & optimize.

Interest level

This report will work in combination with another dimension that you define.  You can report interest level by age or gender, allowing you to know which gender/age group is more interested by your website.

Retention/memorization

Which users are more likely to memorize the message transmitted by your website? If you’re for example a brand or you’re launching a new product, this is something important to you as a visitor retaining your brand/message will be more valuable to you than a visitor who will forget your message.  You can view this in conjunction with other metrics such as age or gender.

Visitor expectations’ matching

This report provides you with a clear view on how well your website is performing against your visitors’ expectations.  We report this in three categories: expectations matched, expectations unmatched or unsure.  Why is this important?  If you’re in sales you’ll learn that managing your prospect’s expectations is crucial. If you fail in addressing their expectations, you will under-perform as a sales person. A website is no different.

Visitor experience

This report tells you how visitors perceive the experience they are having with your website (and with you indirectly).  It is not declarative such as surveys: it provides you with how they really think the experience was.  We provide three categories: good experience (the visitor exited the website satisfied with the time he spent on your site), bad experience and indifferent.

Visitor success ratio

Your visitors have an objective in mind such as finding information about a product, getting support, buying something…  This report allows you to know if your visitors were able to do what they wanted to do.  3 categories are once again reported upon: successful visit, unsuccessful visit and unsure.

These are some of the reports that will be available within NextStage OnSite. This is not about page views or number of visitors but about your visitors and how they think, therefore it’s about marketing and business objectives. Are you engaging with the right audience in the most appealing way?

What’s the opportunity for Web Analytics vendors?

Our aim is to allow web analysts to continue using a Web Analytics tool, adding our reports so they can segment their data in a new way. We don’t provide classical WA reports and we don’t want to go down that road as lots of smart companies are already doing that.  Instead we’re looking for one or two Web Analytics vendors to work with in order to integrate our dimensions into their tool.

What can be done with NSOS + WA?

Imagine that you’re selling different products on your website and each have a different target. To keep this simple, let’s say that you sell products for men and different products for women.  Thanks to NSOS integrated with your WA data you will be able to see if you ‘for men’ products are really appealing to men and vice-versa.  I’ll let you come up with other applications using our reports combined with your current ones.  Don’t hesitate to share them!

Why is this a good opportunity for the vendor(s) to partner with us?

Since the advent of free tools, paying tools are struggling with their unique differentiation. As additional functionalities are being rolled out by free tools, competition will increase.  Nowadays, all conferences that I attend, the same question comes over and over again: Why paying for a tool if free tools like Y!WA and GA do what most paying tools do? Eric has started an interesting discussion about this topic. It’s time for paying tools to find competitive advantages and NextStage OnSite can help.

So if you’re a vendor and want to learn more, don’t hesitate to contact me or if you’re be attending eMetrics Washington this year, come and speak with me.

Cheers,

René

P.S. Keep visiting, there’s more to come.

P.S.S. NSOS will also include recomendations, I’ll explain this in a future post

Where should I begin…

People have asked me why I decided to join NextStage. I just spent a week with Susan and Joseph here in Madrid and working closely with them. I learned a lot about NextStage, Evolution Technology, and they, too, asked me this question (it was like psychotherapy, working with them. When you take NextStage trainings, be prepared). They suggested I write down my thoughts and this post, the first of a series that I’ll be publishing in the coming weeks, contains my answer. My objective with this series is first explain you why I joined NextStage and where we are (this post) and then offer you the possibility to get involved with us and experience first hand our technology (coming posts).

The Promise That Was The Internet…

In December 1995, I got my first Internet connection. Back then; I was studying at the Belgian University of Louvain-la-Neuve. I had a 14k modem, which was pretty cool back when a 3mb file took hours to download. My telephone bills exploded as I used to spend many nights chatting with my cousin who was based in Pamplona, Spain until 5 or 6 in the morning. Don’t ask me why, but I fell in love with this medium. I knew from the start that I would work in the Internet.

The Internet has been around since the 90s for the general population, we can thus state that it’s a very young medium. As such it’s not yet perfect and many organizations struggle in using it correctly. I used to say back when I was running OX2 that over 90% of websites *sucked*, well I think that nowadays the percentage hasn’t changed much.

I considered then, that Web Analytics was the lifebuoy of the Internet, it’d allow companies understand what was happening inside their websites and following the proper actions would lead to a better Internet. Unfortunately after almost 15 years, the Web Analytics Industry hasn’t managed (yet?) to fulfill its promise (aside note: Joseph has conducted a very interesting research regarding this topic that will be presented shortly in his new Blog: The Analytics Ecology).

If we enlarge our perspective and we look at the larger picture (online + offline), the whole marketing discipline is very often based on guts, beliefs or wrong conclusions based on flawed data… The current marketing is not a hard science, I could also argue that it’s not even a soft science, but often it’s based in what I like to call ‘pseudo science’. When I was responding to RFPs and defending them through presentations back at OX2, I was astonished to see the level of subjectivity in which the (online) marketing responsible of big companies were choosing their agency. In the end it was not about coming with the *best* proposal but with the best seduction exercise.

Haven’t you heard a marketing responsible say something in the lines of ‘I’ve been 30 years in this business I know what works and what doesn’t’. OK fair enough, but times have changed, it’s not the 50s anymore.

Today numbers surrounds us, if you like to do jogging for example Apple+Nike offer you a personal trainer that will spit you numbers every time you go for a little footing. It’s the first time in history that we have so many data available (personal and business wise) which often leads to nowhere. Web Analytics tools are a good example: take the average tool, you’ll find dozens and dozens of reports. For most users this is confusing… what do they need to look at, which are relevant for them and which don’t and in the end what all this numbers mean? A US Institution for example reported us during a study that they were incapable of understanding what all those numbers meant and they were not able to draw conclusions and take action. And they weren’t using Google Analytics with a 0,25 FTE, they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year! This is no different in the Marketing Industry, we have plenty of reports, surveys and stats available. What number/stat are relevant? Not an easy answer. And when you take a look at reality, which numbers are being picked up? Unfortunately, many times the numbers that best serve the preconceived idea are selected. That’s what many consultants do. I’ve seen it!

So my point here is that the current field of (online) marketing is based on moving sands. There is not a commonly accepted theory that can explain the mechanics of this field, thus we’re not able to correctly predict what will be the impact of an initiative. You could argue that there are theories as the 4Ps, but let’s face it, this is not a scientific theory.

Then I Met This Guy Joseph and I thought He was a Little Nuts…

When I first came into contact with Joseph Carrabis and NextStage I was skeptic, as I’ve explained in a previous post, I thought that it was too good to be true. But after having played with it, asked questions, made research and having read a lot of documents that Joseph and his team shared with me, I got convinced. I saw that not only it was possible, also that it made sense and that Joseph had actually achieved it.

From time to time in the past months I’ve been silent. My questions gave me questions and I wanted to be sure of the answers. I have a Cartesian mind and NextStage’s internal documentation isn’t easy for me to read. I took my time and wasn’t happy until I understood the answer and saw it working. I revisited the documents again and again and again, I reread and I played with NextStage tools (and soon you will be able to play with some of them, too). Each time I have a doubt, I study and play until I get convinced. I do this because I’m often facing people that are trying either to discredit what we do or they just don’t believe us, so I have to study and learn. This is not always work for me. On a more positive side, the more I study and learn the more I find inspiration for new tools and applications of the technology. Even if some will never see the day, I really enjoy letting my imagination fly (and when you sit with Susan and Joseph, imagination flying is full of laughs).

For me, NextStage is cool not only because of the fact that it’s something so new and futuristic but also because of the fact that it can do so many amazing things. I feel like we’re in a boat in the 15th century ready to discover the new world. When I was a kid I liked to play with LEGO, what was most appealing to me was to build things, once I built something I moved to build something else and if necessary I would destroy what I had done previously if I needed a particular piece. I sometimes feel that I’m back in those days (remember me to explain you one day my theory of Lego and entrepreneurship ). Evolution Technology can take many shapes and flavors, this convinces me that I won’t get bored in the future. Let me share something I included in a column I wrote for Online Strategies Magazine that will maybe allow to better understand why:

NextStage’s Evolution Technology (ET) is now a patented field of “basic” technology that early investors have described as being similar to plastic. Like plastic, ET can shape itself to whatever a client’s needs are. As one early investor says:

“Plastic can do anything and everything from protecting your small child dropping a bottle of juice on the floor (it just bounces away) to delivering life-saving medicine or nutrients to a person in the hospital getting an IV. But it’s not really about the plastic, it’s how you apply it. It’s a base, a start. What you can do with it is limited only by your imagination.”

What is it that ET can do that makes it like plastic? It allows any programmable device to understand and respond to how somebody is thinking.

The vision of the Future, objective: happiness

In light of the capabilities of our technology, the possibilities are tremendous. My purpose here is not to list all the products and applications that could be developed with Evolution Technology (Aurélie, my wife, suggests me to crowdsource this; well I might do it in the future ). What I’d like to share with you, is my vision for the future. What will have changed in 20 years? How Evolution Technology can help us live in a better world? But first you need to understand some background information. People that know me, know that I’m not in this field just for the money. I always said that if my aim in life had been to make a maximum of money I would probably be doing something else. My aim is to enjoy what I do and to try to help as I can to shape a better future for my son Luca. Aurélie and I often debate about the foundations of our society and economy. Recently for example we have discussed quite a lot around the notion of Happiness versus the notion of GDP. I will not go into the discussion now, if you want you can read Aurélie’s post that covers this topic. The reason why I’m telling you this is that I believe that Evolution Technology can help us being a happier planet. This is the reason why we’re not searching external funding and we’re a self-funded company; we want to keep the control of how this technology is applied.

Intelligence behind Evolution Technology & Machines

Evolution Technology is thus able to understand how somebody is thinking and respond to it. My vision of this capability is that in the future we’ll have more intelligent machines. I’m sure you’ve noticed, we often say that machines are dumb. Haven’t you yelled in your life against your computer or telephone for not doing what you wanted them to do? You could put it saying that they are as intelligent as they have been programmed. Machines, usually don’t learn and they don’t take decisions by themselves. This is where Evolution Technology enters:

Evolution Technology is able to learn. One example is that it learns languages and learns how people react to the new languages it’s learning. ET is curious and thus when facing something he doesn’t understand it will try to figure it out through experience (Mmmm, doesn’t humans behave in a similar way?).

Evolution Technology is able to adapt. As ET learns by being in contact with people it adapts its beliefs as these change in the society. What I mean here is that people 20yo today are not the same as 20yo 10 years ago and ET is aware of that. Every 3 months Evolution Technology puts itself ‘to sleep’ for a few hours as us humans do every night and then it recalibrates based on the new experiences it has had in the past 3 months. This means that ET gets more and more accurate/intelligent with time.

How this is going to be applied to machines? In many ways, let me give you some examples:

Intelligent Websites

As I mentioned before most websites don’t work. One of the main reasons is that these websites are sending the wrong signals. Joseph says in his latest book:

“Interfaces are like children sent out into the world, Like a child, these interfaces go out to the world and represent the parents’ best efforts to turn the child out right.

Psychologists and family therapists know that families often bring in little Johnny or little Sally and say, “Our child needs help,” when more times than not the entire family dynamic needs help. Little Johnny or little Sally is the family’s “designated client”. Make little Johnny or little Sally well and the family will be well, too. Interfaces, like troubled children, are the designated client in the business communication, marketing and messaging world.”

Joseph Carrabis, Reading Virtual Minds Volume I – p.50

How can Evolution Technology help solving this? First of all ET allows to understand what message you’re providing (eg. Zappos’ Sentiment Analysis with NextStage), and it can provide you with suggestions to correct this message. But going further we could integrate ET with a CMS or a Personalization engine and then provide one2one experiences. This is not science fiction, this exists already. Joseph developed a prototype of this in the early 2000 called ‘The Forest’ and it consists of a website that will adapt itself on every click depending on who’s behind the computer (it can for example start playing music if it thinks that you’re not paying attention to the page and you’re mainly auditory). As I’ve already explained in the past our web technology tracks mouse movements and keyboard activity (not what they type but how), and this information allows us to understand how the user is thinking while browsing the website. As many people has expressed the will to see our technology in action and play with it, I’ve asked our ITs to prepare the Forest again in a server, thus you’ll be able to play with it very shortly for a limited time. I’ll keep you posted in this Blog when it will be available.

Let me give you another example of how ET will be able to help you as a website owner. I guess that you are familiar with the notion of bouncing in websites. During one of the latest tests that we have undertaken we found a way of detecting a bounce 2-3 seconds before it happens. This means that if our technology is linked to a CMS or a real time personalization engine we would be able to send an alert and then something would happen in order to try to keep the visitor in the website. We could go further and not only alert of the coming bounce but also provide some information about the user in order to select the best action. To simplify, we could provide the info visitor33452 is going to bounce and he’s an auditory type. With this information the system receiving the info would play some sound or voice over in the website in order to catch the visitor attention and keep him in the website. You might argue that the visitor might not like this, I would disagree to this assertion, the visitor is leaving because he wasn’t able to complete the reason why he came and he probably leave having had a bad experience. Thanks to ET, we will try to solve this and provide him with what he’s looking for as we will help the website to send the message its trying to send in a way which is compatible with the visitor. The purpose of a website owner (except ad based websites) is not to keep you as much possible on their website, it’s to allow you to achieve something like buying a plane ticket, get some support, … NextStage would then allow website owners to better achieve this.

More secured operations

Evolution Technology is able to learn to recognize people. By being in contact 6 times in a week with an individual, ET is able to create what I like to describe as a brain print (like a finger print but of the brain). This brain print is unique for each individual in the planet, thus it could permit identifying somebody. Once the brain print is in the system, identification can be done in a few seconds on any computer connected to it. (Note: This is something we’re not doing online for privacy concerns, it will be only done with prior authorization).

An application of this is security within companies (it’s stronger than passwords as these can be lost or stolen or even fingerprints as you can get your finger cut) so you wouldn’t need to login, the system would be able to recognize you in few seconds. As Our technology is for ‘any programmable device’ this means that it could also be applied to ATMs where we could see if the person using it is the holder of the credit card. Another security example is plane cockpits, ET would be able to know if the pilot is the correct one and even it could detect if he’s under threat (in case of a hijacking) and send an alert (that depends on the business rules that will be defined in each case). It could be used to deactivate a weapon if the owner is not holding it… From here I let you imagination come up with other applications

As I explained in our ‘Predicting Age and Gender Online’ White paper, ET is able to determine age very accurately. Thus ET could be used to protect children forums from adults with bad intentions (we can also see if the person is in what we call a ‘predatory’ state so we could see if the adult is a parent surfing with his child).

Better learning systems

As you will find out reading Joseph’s last book, Evolution Technology was the result of a question that Joseph had back in 1987: how people go through the different learning stages? This question lead in the end to answer the question of why people excel in certain domains while others don’t.

So education was the aim of this technology when it first got invented. By understanding how people think ET can thus find the best way to provide information. In the field of education, this translates to allowing a system to determine the learning style of any person and thus adapt the material so he will learn it *his way*. Online courses (or any computer based course) for example would adapt themselves depending on the pupil and thus guarantee that they would get the best possible learning from the system.

Getting back to what I said earlier, Evolution Technology is thus as plastic: it can take many shapes and thus have plenty of applications. I think that now with just the above mentioned examples of applications you’re understanding more why I joined Joseph at NextStage.

So where are we right now?

As I’ve said in the past, the first months at NextStage I was feeling like Charlie in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Joseph is as prolific researching as he’s prolific blogging, thus it was hard deciding which way to go. But we decided to go in the (Online) Marketing field as our main focus for this first stage.

The prototypes that Joseph had developed were not made for enterprise situations, their scalability wasn’t there and the technology was a bit. Thus our IT team, based in the US, is working in recoding the different engines in order to allow scalability, and Joseph is also refining the math.

My aim is to have the OnSite tool ready for Q1-Q2 2010. Our first product, NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI), is currently testing and debugging.

The good news is that once NSAI is out there we’ll be able to roll out some other tools based on the same engines as our Sentiment Analysis tool pretty fast as it’s just another *flavor*

In parallel we’re doing some consultancy based on our technology as some companies have asked us help and we go to certain conferences. We are also open to other complimentary actions and this is what I will cover in future posts.

So this was the first post explaining why you should care and where we are. In the coming days/weeks I’ll continue posting in this series, as my purpose is to propose you ways to get involved with this technology.

Here are the topics of the posts I’ve currently drafted:

• NextStage and the future of Web Analytics
• How NextStage can help media buying agencies
• How NextStage can help jobs sites (eg. Monster) and HR departments

So keep visiting.

As always comments and questions are welcome.

Cheers,

René

In a couple of weeks lots of Web Analytics folks will gather as usual at eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington.  As you know this is an event that I haven’t missed in years, but this time is special.  This time I’m not only going as advisor of eMetrics or Chair of the Globalization effort of the WAA, this time I also attend as Gold Sponsor!

NextStage Analytics has been working hard to get our first tool, NextStage Advertising Intelligence, ready and we’re going to open the curtain and show you what it is and how it works.  I’m not going to have a booth and all that, but instead I’ve booked a Suite so I can make some private demonstrations of our technology and explain you where we are.

As Gold Sponsor of eMetrics we have a 10′ presentation and I’ve scheduled it on Wednesday the 21st just before Eric’s Web Analytics Wednesday (so you can come by and talk after my presentation).  What will I present?

Does Your Audience Wear a Tie, a Blouse or Knickers?

Is your marketing material geared to men or women? Young or Old? College educated or high school dropout? Hispanic or Asian-American? And can you prove it? Be one of the first to see NextStage’s Advertising Intelligence tool. In about 30 seconds NextStage Advertising Intelligence can tell you who your material will impact and how strongly.
Be there…and dress well.

You have probably noticed that I’m not based in cloudy Belgium anymore but in sunny Spain.  Some friends have asked me: ‘And what about the Belgian chocolates tradition at the Lobby Bar?‘  To be honest, at first, I wanted to bring some Spanish chocolates.  Aurélie and I have thus ta/ested all the luxury chocolates that we’ve found here in Madrid…  Unfortunately the ta/este results where very clear: You can’t compare Marcolini’s chocolates to Spanish chocolates…  Then Aurélie suggested me to bring some Jamon iberico ham. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that it won’t pass through customs and if it does, I don’t think that the Hotel manager will be happy if I start cutting ham at the lobby bar

So in the end I’ve decided not to change the tradition (some things don’t change).  Yes, I will be bringing some Marcolini chocolates that are currently traveling between Brussels and Madrid

To recap:

• Attend my session @ eMetrics on Wednesday 21st at 5:50pm
• Poke me at any time during the conference if you want to learn more (@rdo on twitter), and most important…
• Come by the Lobby Bar every evening to get your fix of fabulous Belgian chocolates!

I hope to see you there!

Cheers,

René

P.S. I leave you with some words from our Godfather (something we did over 2 years ago at OX2):

Have you been asking yourself about what was behind NextStage’s Evolution Technology?

Now it’s your opportunity to learn it as Joseph Carrabis has just released his first book of a series that will unveil the details of our technology.

This first volume explains the history and the science behind Evolution Technology.  I encourage you to read Christopher Berry’s review here if you want to have an independent opinion on the book.  You won’t regret buying this book as in addition to unveiling Evolution Technology, it’s filled with anecdotes and great learnings!

The book is currently only available through NextStage Evolution’s website.  Why?  Good question!  Instead of knocking on editors’ doors, which would have been very time consuming in these times of crisis, and as this book is about a new field of technology, Joseph has decided (and I warmly encouraged him) to create his own publishing company: NorthernLights Publishing (for those who know Joseph, they recognize his passion to look up North to Nova Scotia ).  We expect the book to be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in a month or so, but you can order copies directly from Joseph and even request to get them signed

Last but not least, let’s part with a quote from Jim Sterne taken from the foreword of the book:

“I trust you to buy this book.  You can trust me that I have put Joseph’s knowledge and technology to the test. This book is important to the evolution of marketing and important to you and your business success.  It explains the magic.”

Jim Sterne

Once you read it, please don’t hesitate to share your comments!

Cheers,

René

Ever since I met Joseph Carrabis and started to learn about NextStage’s Technology, I’ve seen that the most common reaction to his claims has been skepticism. And to be frank I was one of the skeptics at first. I remember the discussions that Joseph and I were having in San Francisco almost 3 years ago. He was explaining me what NextStage was doing and my first thoughts were ‘yeah, and after you’re going to tell me that you’ve invented teleportation…‘ But something inside of me kept me listening, my subconscious was telling me that there was something… So, I kept listening patiently, did some research and played with a couple of his prototypes. I got convinced!

Last Friday, I published the first White Paper of NextStage Analytics and our friend Jacques Warren published a post in which he was expressing interest but also skepticism.  So here is a response to him and to others that might be in the same situation.

Our technology is based on 20 years of R&D and you can read more about it for example by reading the patent given in 2008, that I could synthesize in: “Understanding how an individual is thinking through a programmable device“.  You can read the patent here.  Also Joseph is going to publish a book very very soon called ‘Reading Virtual Minds‘, this is going to be the first volume of a series in which he will explain the technology and his journey while doing his research.

So we can understand how a person is thinking without having to ask a question in a non intrusive manner.  Our technology allows us to do many other things.  For example, as we collect anonymous “brain prints” (we like to call them synthetic users) in our systems we’re thus able to predict how a ‘type’ of individual is going to react to any piece of information or marketing material (that’s what we’re using in NextStage Advertising Intelligence that will be launched soon).  We can also create far more accurate ‘personas’ that what’s been done currently in Marketing that we call at NextStage Rich Personae^TM (I’ll talk more about this in a future post).

Getting back to Jacques’ post, he wonders if we can predict if somebody is a hot prospect.  Joseph has already pointed to some reports that we will provide that can help you determining this.  Let me share with you another report from our prototype called: ‘The Tirekickers Report’

The Tirekickers Report (I’ve included a screenshot taken in 2003, so you can see that this is not new to us) indicates how many of your site visitors are serious buyers versus how many are just doing research, and where they are in their research. For example, the first category is ‘Grazing’ and indicates how many site visitors are basically channel surfing and stopped on your site for some reason. The different gradations then go to ‘Making a Decision’, ‘Not the Decision Maker’ and onto ‘Buyers’. Remember, this doesn’t mean they will buy from your website, only that they want to buy something while they’re on your website.

Since I’ve become CEO of NextStage, skepticism is still the main reaction that I encounter, and this is something that I expected, reason why we did the independent test presented in the White Paper to prove the accuracy of our predictions. After having presented the results in San Jose, some of the skeptics came to see me and told me that I had convinced them, even if they don’t fully understand how we do it.

My aim is not that people understands how we do it, I leave that to Joseph with his research, writings and trainings. My aim is to demonstrate that it works and develop & launch products around our technology.

Christopher Berry, one of our early fans and a tester of our technology posted recently: “You don’t need to understand it to use it” and this is exactly my point.  As Jim Novo commented to that post:

If I A / B visitors, A exposed to “normal” treatment (control) and B exposed to Next Stage treatment, and B outperformas A by 25% consistently, then I don’t need to know how Next Stage works or run any kind of significance math.

All I need to know is what it costs to get me the 25% and what the profit of the 25% is to decide if the 25% is worth it.

So, bear with us, we’re preparing products which I’m sure you’ll love.

Cheers from sunny Madrid,

René

Following my presentation @ eMetrics San Jose where I presented the results of an independent test that we conducted in April 2009, here’s the White Paper that describes it.

You’ll see that in this test, NextStage Analytics had an accuracy of 99% for gender prediction and 98% for age prediction.

In the coming weeks Joseph will be publishing on www.nextstagevolution.com the academic version of this White Paper with all the scientific details and an extensive bibliography.  I’ll keep you posted when it’s available.

Don’t hesitate to post your questions and comments or contact me directly.

Cheers,

René

Last June Joseph and I had the pleasure to attend the iMedia Brand Summit in Colorado Springs where Joseph was doing a Master Class.  In his session titled ‘The Usability Doctor is in’, attendees to the conference were able to pick Joseph brain’s and have a free audit of the design of their website.

What you’ll see hereunder are the videos of that session that iMedia was kind to record and provide to us.

So why I’m showing you this to you?  First because you’ll find some great takeaways that you can use in your future web designs and also because what Joseph is doing in the video is what our NextStage patented Evolution Technology does automatically without any human intervention.  This gives you thus an idea of what to expect from our future tools.

Video 1: Introduction + Barnes&Noble Case (part 1) + Search is the last bastion of poor design (you might want to skip the intro)

Video 2: Barnes&Noble case (part 2) + History.com case (part 1)

Video 3: History.com case (part 2) + Oreck.com case (part 1)

Video 4: Oreck.com case (part 2) + Capital One + The God Spot

Video 5: History.com case (part 3) + Tourists vs. Locals + Taco Bell case (part 1)

Video 6: Taco Bell case (part 2) + Barbie.com case + Scott.com case (part 1)

Video 7: Scott.com (part 2) + Joseph thoughts about Online Surveys

I’m sure you’ve enjoyed the videos, don’t hesitate to share your comments or post your questions hereunder.  If you’re hungry for more and want to read further, look at Joseph’s post that includes a full bibliography

If you want to give a try to one of our tools, sign up for the Alpha of NextStage Advertising Intelligence!

Cheers from sunny Madrid,

René

UPDATE:

Joseph just published on the iMedia website a detailed post where he explains more in depth some of the tips he gave during this session.

It’s with great joy that I can announce the launch of the first NextStage product: NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI), the product will be ready for you to use in about a month or so. We’re looking for companies interested in using our tool and provide us feed-back in exchange.

But before I explain you how you can become one of the lucky first companies that will use our tool let me tell you what you can expect:

NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI) tool looks at any electronic information – a webpage, an email, a document, a press release, a marketing campaign, a print ad, … – and determines the “best fit” audience segment for that information.

NSAI provides five basic reports; Age Appeal, Gender Appeal, Clarity, Message Comprehension and Target Market Profile. NSAI analyzes material against a backdrop of over 250,000 “Rich Personae” (NextStage uses also the term “synthetic users”). These rich personae or synthetic users vary in age from 15-85yo, Male and Female, high school through post doctoral education, low to high level income. These 250,000 synthetic users are based on over 20 years of study and research on how different demographic groups interact with information. Common uses of NSAI include

• Before and After “audience engagement”snapshots of changes to websites, emails, press releases.
• A comparison tool between competitive websites (for example) to learn what works and what doesn’t.
• A design tool during media development to insure matching layout and content to the desired market.
• Fine tuning existing media presentations to improve performance (sales, click-throughs, repeat visitors, etc)

NSAI in its Alpha version consists of the following five elements:

1) Age Appeal: a measure of which age groups will find the overall presentation of your material attractive and what percentage of each age group will be attracted. Note that finding something attractive is not the same as liking something. People are attracted to traffic accidents but few people would want to take part in one. Information can be appealing because it’s genuinely engaging or because it’s so horrific people can’t pull themselves away.

The examples presented in this post are from the test of a web page design.  The image of the layout was uploaded into our systems and we created some graphs in Excel with the data that the prototype of NextStage Advertising Intelligence provided us with.

In the Age appeal report you’ll notice  that the people under 45 seem to be attracted by the tested design.

2) Message Clarity: a measure of which age groups will be able to readily understand your material. Note that understanding something is not the same as being able to make use of something. Someone may understand the sentence “Anthony is a pretty boy” but not be able to make use of it unless they know Anthony is a parrot and the sentence is how Anthony asks for a peanut.

We see that the tested design will be understandable by people between 20 and 44 years old.

3) Message Comprehension: a measure of which age groups will be able to use the messages conveyed by your material. Comprehension usually requires the ability to relate previously or otherwise known information with the immediate information to synthesize new information or perform a desired action. An example of Comprehension would be someone having done research into competitive products and realizing your price, product, service, guarantee, etc., are better and therefore your product or service is the one they should purchase or invest in.

In  the presented example we see that the younger audience will comprehend the message conveyed by the design.  The older audience (over 35 years old) will have difficulties and we can assume that will have a higher bounce rate and will be less satisfied by the website design, thus the website itself.

4) Gender Appeal: a measure of how well your material appeals to each gender as a percentage of viewing population.

As we clearly identify in the screenshot presented.  The website design analyzed will specially be appealing to females which was the intention in this case.

Let’s focus on the four reports examples that we’ve just provided.  In this case, our customer wanted to target young females, preferably under 25.  We see in the graphs presented, that regarding gender they are well on spot, the same can be said to the attraction that the design will perform upon their target audience and the comprehension of the conveyed message.  But if you look at the clarity report, you’ll see that some optimization can be done.  We’ve thus made some simple recommendations to improve this, in this case, we suggested changing the position of certain elements in the design to increase the clarity to the under 25 years old.

5) Target Market Profile: Our technology understands several thousands of personality traits and personality types, what we call “Rich Personae”. These different personality traits and types interact with information differently.  NSAI compares and contrasts its database of some 250,000 personality traits and types to determine which types of people would interact most favorably with the tested material. These “Rich Personae” become thus the tested material’s target market profile(s), meaning these are the types of people who’ll respond most favorably to the message’s presentation.  We categorize these rich personae by a letter and a number, but you can call them Pete or Mary if you prefer.  Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

In a test that we have done recently with NSAI gave us as best target audience the rich personae K23 and K15.  NSAI gave us also what were the characteristics of these two types synthetic users:

• prefer to experience something firsthand
• prefer to have things demonstrated to them only after they’ve demonstrated that they can handle the basics (imagine someone who will only take Drivers Ed after they’ve driven a car a little bit)
• will listen to a discussion or explanation usually to determine when the speaker/teacher makes a mistake (according to their own experience, as described above)
• will learn most quickly if the experience mentioned above results in an uncomfortable or undesirable outcome
• tend to ignore positive-based information as either unreal or unsubstantiated
• will intuitively decide negative-based information is “real” and/or “what actually happened”
• have a poor sense of time or involvement
• have no, little or a poor concept of time and/or process, and are rarely aware of what’s involved in getting something done
• pay little to no attention to arguments, strategies or plans which reference or rely on specific, time-based events
• are more likely to be swayed by arguments, strategies or plans which reference general and/or on-going events (events which have remained fairly stable over time, like the sun always rises in the morning)
• often fail at time-based tasks such as time-lines and project plans, and have little use for project management
• create a strong inner focus on what interests them
• tend to have a “this is as good as it gets” attitude and “this” isn’t too good
• long-lasting decisions and learnings will be made based on an overall sense of what to avoid
• are unaffected by appeals to past or future events, regardless if they reference rewards or punishments
• base decisions on immediate experience and tend to be negative in nature
• are attracted to and will focus on demonstrations of problems or difficulties

So this is what you can expect in the alpha version of NSAI, but there will be more.

We’re preparing other insights that will be added to NextStage Advertising Intelligence in the future, among them, recommendations.  One of the reasons we’re looking for testers at this stage is to help us fine tune our recommendations capabilities thanks to their feedback.  We have used our tool for recently for a top 500 company before the launch of a new campaign website that will be released in over 30 localized versions worldwide. On top of the current NSAI reports listed above, we also provided with recommendations based on our technology and the customer told us when he read the recommendations:

We received the NSAI Analysis on a proposed redesign of a major web 2.0 web-initiative. The result was:

• easy to understand reports
• very valuable and clear suggestions for possible optimizations
• last but not least it was proving that we were on the right track regarding the design strategy for the specific target audience. But now we know how to be even better!

How can you be one the first to test this out?

You just need to send me an email or use the contact form explaining what material (or type of material if it hasn’t been created yet) you would like to analyze.

Need some examples of why should you use NSAI? It can help you decide among different options: imagine that you’re preparing a new website or a new print ad and that your agency has provided you with 3 different proposals, NSAI can help you to determine which one will best fit your target audience.  You can also use NSAI as a kind of ‘audit’ tool to check if your marketing materials are designed for your target audience.  Recently, I was having a discussion with somebody and he said that in the Internet designs were made by 20-40 years old and that often weren’t really appealing to baby-boomers, this is something that you can easily check with NSAI.  So what are you waiting?

We will be accepting 25 Alpha Testers.  Each tester will be able to use NSAI and get the reports of 5 different materials.  As stated, we’ll only ask you some questions after you’ve used the tool.  If after that, you want to continue using the tool during the alpha period, it will cost you only 49$ per usage.  NSAI during his alpha period will only be available to these 25 testers.

Looking forward hearing from you.

Cheers,

René

For those who know me, resilience has been one of those principles I’ve always adopted, both for my company and for my customers. I remember, when I was CEO of OX2, presenting the Resilience concept to some marketers here in Brussels: what it was, why it was important and how it could be applied to their needs. I was amased to see how most of them didn’t even know what the word exactly meant…

In today’s ever faster evolving world, partially due to the digital evolution, resilience is more than ever essential if companies want to stay ahead of the game. At NextStage we try to be very resilient. Here you’ll start to wonder why I’m saying all this…

Listening to customer feedback and following very productive discussions in the past few weeks with many interesting people in the field of Analytics and Marketing, we have decided that, besides our Onsite Analytics tool, there are other products that make sense to launch.

Why? Because our technology allows to do so much more. It has been challenging for me to decide where to start. If you know Joseph, founder of NextStage and the mind behind our technology, chances are that you had noticed how prolific he can be. He has several blogs, publishing several times a week on top of doing constant research. He comes up with new ideas and applications of our technology very frequently. This was also true in the past thus, at NextStage, there are prototypes of many different tools that we’re planning on releasing in the near future.

The first tool that I want to launch is NSAI (NextStage Advertising Intelligence). NextStage’s NSAI tool allows you to optimize any marketing collateral ranging from a print ad (Yes, offline!) to a website or a banner. You won’t have to wait years: expect it to be ready sometime after the summer. Let me explain you a little bit how it is going to work.

What does NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI) do?

NSAI is an online service where you can come and test your marketing collateral to see how well it’s going to work with your target audience. Not only that: it also tells you what you need to change, giving you recommendations, to better fit your audience.
Basically, you will log into our system and the first thing that you will do is define your target audience(s). This is done through a form that will allow us to understand in our terms who you are targetting to. This reminds me that I’ll have to explain our concept of NextStage Rich Personae, which is one of the most actionable persona clasification that I’ve seen so far but that’s a whole other story.
So, once your target audience is defined, you are ready to upload any marketing collateral or point a url for analysis. Our systems will go through the material and gauge how well it will perform with the audience(s) you have defined.
In more than 90% of the cases, we expect to be able to send you the results within 2 hours. An email will alert you that the analysis has been performed.

NSAI analyzes the different design elements including shapes and colors and also text as our technology understand language and can thus gauge it’s effectiveness. The first version of the tool will only be available for materials in English (US & UK) and canadian French. Well, Joseph will tell you that it also works in Gaelic, as this is the first language that our technology has learned, but honestly, who cares? I’m preparing another post that explains in more details how NSAI does this.

You will then be able to log-in – through the link provided in the email for usablities’ sake – into the system and view the different reports that will show you how well your collateral is going to work with your audience. In addition you will see a list of recommendations that you can apply in order to optimize it and make it more effective. This later is for me the most interesting and valuable feature of our tool and it will fulfill the promise of our tagline: Making Marketing Actionable!

Other future tools

The other tools, also based on existing prototypes, that I’m currently considering to launch in the coming months are the following:

A Resume analyzer

This tool will be very helpful for Human Resources departments that want to have a better understanding of the people that apply to a position. By using this tool, HR Responsibles will be able to better gauge if the candidate will fit the job description and will help to reduce the number of failures in recruiting, a costly endeavour, certainly in these times. I know that a big job site was interested in adding this tool to their offering, but well I wasn’t in charge back then and you know that Joseph is a researcher not a business man

A Political campaign analyzer

This tool will allow politicians to gauge the effectiveness of their political messages and campaign collateral and also compare themselves to other candidates. NextStage has been active in the political space and has made very accurate predictions of US elections and primary races with an astonishing level of accuracy. You might have seen Joseph on television as he’s always interviewed during US political campaings. Read how NextStage was able to predict election outcomes back in 2004 with amazing accuracy – you can also read Joseph’s prolific work about politics here).

Sentiment Analysis

Last but not least, Joseph has been doing some research in Sentiment analysis lately and he has come with a very interesting aproach, different from what I’ve seen in other products. Our approach is more qualitative than quantitative and our aim is not to replace existing products in the social media space, that crawl the Internet in order to provide buzz monitoring or pr reputation. Instead, our tool will provide a very exhaustive analysis of the materials it feads upon. Joseph has done for example Sentiment Analysis of Zappos’ CEO Twitter Account which presents following a discussion we had with Christopher Berry from Critical Mass.

As we’re not yet done with these developments, we’re open to any feedback, requirements or ideas that you would love to see implemented. Drop me a line through the comments box hereunder or contact me privately through email (rdo @ nextstageanalytics DOT com) or the contact form with your ideas and suggestions.

So what do you think? I’m looking forward hearing from you

A few weeks ago, I presented at eMetrics San Jose the results of an independent test. The purpose of the test was to prove the accuracy of NextStage’s Evolution Technology.

Here’s the video (you might want to skip the first 45 seconds):

Thanks to Laura Lee Dooley for taking the video and posting it.

Very shortly I’ll publish a marketing white paper describing the test methodology and the results of the test. In addition a more detailed scientific White Paper (intended for Joseph’s research peers and to be presented at scientific conferences in the US and China) will be available from NextStage Evolution after conference publication.

We don’t claim to have a 98% or 99% accuracy across all NextStage Analytics Reports as this test was created to prove that our technology could predict age and gender, but in ‘real life’ we expect to have an overall accuracy across all reports of about 83%.

Don’t hesitate to send me your comments and questions through the comment box or directly in the contact page.

René

Yesterday I briefly presented at eMetrics the results of an independent test that was undertaken to audit the accuracy of the technology behind NextStage Analytics.  For those who couldn’t attend, the accuracy of our predictions in this test were between 98% and 99%.

I’ll be publishing a White Paper explaining this test next week.  In the meantime, I wanted to explain a little bit more about the value proposition that NextStage Analytics will provide in the near future and specially Age and Gender predictions.

One question that was addressed to me after my presentation was ‘How actionable are Age and Gender predictions’?  My canadian friend Jacques Warren also made a similar comment through twitter in which he said:

OK and are gender and age predictive of anything?

So I wanted to respond as I guess that other people might have the same kind of questions.

First of all age and gender aren’t predictive of anything really actionable per se (well, maybe it would allow me to know that I’ll be able to market you some Viagra in a few years ). More seriously, the purpose of my presentation was to demonstrate the accuracy of our predictions.  Let me give you an example of how you will be able to use NextStage and its ability to predict gender.

So let’s take for the sake of this example that I’m the CMO of a brand that targets women.

So I’ve built a great new website about my products targetted to females and I’m doing advertising in 2 different websites in order to attract traffic to my new website.  Let’s imagine that the first month I spend 50.000$ in online advertising evenly in the 2 referral websites to which I pay a CPC of 0.1$.  This means that I’ll get 500.000 visitors.  The question is then, are they my target? Can I optimize my efficiency thanks to gender predictions?

With NextStage Analytics I’ll be able to gauge the gender breakdown for the referrals sent:

Referral A: 30% females 70% males

Referral B: 90% females 10% males

Based on these numbers I realize in fact that even if I’m paying 0,1$ per visitor that comes to my website, but the ‘cost per woman’ is not the same per referral.  So let’s look at how many women each referral is sending me and then what’s the ‘cost per woman’ sent to my website:

Referral A: 75.000 women – Cost per woman: 0.33$

Referral B: 225.000 women – Cost per woman: 0.11$

So as you can see, in order to have a woman coming to my website, I’ll need to pay 3 times more to Referral A than B.

After this first campaign I want to optimize my results, the second month I’ll switch then all my budget to referral B, meaning that with the same budget, I can get 450.000 female visitors instead of 300.000.

This means that without increasing my budget, I can increase by 50 % the results of the number of women coming to my website.

Simple and actionable – isn’t it?

René

P.S. You can also read a recent blog post from Joseph that presents another example of how Marketing is a science and how NextStage and its ability to predict gender can help.

After a few days of being up and running, I went to analyse a little bit the first hundreds of visits to this Blog and I see that most of visitors are a bit confused with this Blog.   I understand that the technology that we have it’s not the most easy to understand and as we don’t have NextStage Analytics out there yet it’s also confusing what NextStage Analytics will do.

Why do I say that people are confused?  Well that’s NextStage Analytics that tells me that (see image hereunder. The yellow circles are confusion points. There were more, these were the big ones and we’re only showing results from the home page), during the first days we placed the JavaScript of NextStage to gather data and see how people were reacting.  So this means that I still have to do some work to simplify and to explain things better (The blue circles are what people want more information on).

Were do I start?  Well, I’m going to start explaining NextStage Analytics as this is going to be the product that you’ll be able to use in a few months.  How odes it work and what is does?  Let me first quote Shaina from Critical Mass ( you can read other quotes here) that wrote a very good summary of NextStage Analytics:

“NextStage’s patented technology uses mouse tracking techniques to collect subconscious behaviour, which is mapped to 70+ different personality types derived from traditional psycho and emotional cognitive behaviours from a 100k+ behaviours database. The technology also eliminates the need for first or third party cookies, giving a much more accurate read on unique visitors. It can even tell unique visitors apart on shared computers because the subconscious behaviour is different by user. … [NextStage's Sentiment Mining technology] can be used in place of traditional qualitative research techniques and quantitative surveys, especially in the area of product development and response to design and communications.”

So this means that NextStage Analytics doesn’t report upon click stream data as other WA tools.  It reports upon how you interact with the website you’re visiting, how you move your mouse and how you type in your keyboard (not what you type). For example, the red circles in the image are the things Evolution Technology determined were recognized by the majority of visitors as brands or were in the process of becoming brands (what Joseph calls “going into deep memory and cognition” and thank you for recognizing me as a personal brand). ET can also determine which brands are brand ascendent (coming into awareness) and brand descendent (becoming passe).

With the information that we collect from the way you navigate thanks to our patented technology, we’re able to translate that into valuable information as: your age, your gender, are you satisfied (green circles) or confused (the yellow circles) with the website and many other things that we will unveil shortly.  As Shaina said in her quote we also have a huge bahaviour database that allows us to determine the personnality of the visitor which allows us to see if the website is effective with them.  As we can see this NextStage Analytics is able to provide you with suggestions of improvement (or recommendation if you prefer).  This is what really thrills me about this tool.

René

Dear readers,

Welcome to Making Marketing Actionable, where I’ll be blogging from now on.  This is the first post of this blog that I hope will intrigue you. For more information about me, or why I have joined NextStage, stay tuned, I’ll explain it in a future post.  Today, I wanted to start by talking to you about our technology which I believe is going to revolutionize our industry.

You’re not familiar with NextStage and it’s technology?

If you’re not yet familiar with NextStage Analytics and our patented Evolution Technology, please start your journey by going to the About pages that you will find on the top menu.  There, you will find explanations of who we are and more interesting: what we do; including some interesting details about our patented technology.

Are you already familiar with NextStage and its technology?

Well, then we have exciting news for you as we’re currently preparing the first product based on our ‘mindreading’ technology. as John Lovett baptised it last year in one of his blog posts. Well, in fact our tool can’t read your mind, know what you’re thinking (for example if you’re thinking about your next vacation), but we can see how you think it (are you happy while you think about your coming vacation?).

But before we start telling you what will this product will do for you in details I wanted to let you know that we’ve been working in answering the question that was on everybody’s lips:

Does it really work?

I have the pleasure to announce you that it works!  But you don’t need to believe me I understand that you remain skeptical, I have to admit that at first I was skeptical too.

If you want to learn more and get the hard facts, come to eMetrics San Jose next week to find out by yourself.  We will be making a quick presentation that shows the results of an independent test in order to asses the acuracy of NextStage Analytics with gender and age calculations.
What do I mean?  Our tool can very accurately determine the gender and age of an individual visiting a website that we track, we thus did an independent test to veryfy our accuracy.

The protocol and results of this test will be presented at eMetrics, so don’t miss it!

After this presentation at eMetrics, we will start revealing through this Blog the capabilities of NextStage Analytics.

Looking forward seeing you @eMetrics and enjoy the reading,

René

P.S. I still have some work on the look and feel of this Blog, so please be indulgent in the first weeks