Category: Articles

Our New Best Place

Our New Best Place

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Before moving into Matt Carmichael’s former house earlier this month, my husband and I had lived in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood for almost 15 years; it was our perfect place. We bought our Logan Square two-bedroom, one-bath condo in 2006 at the height of the real-estate bubble, unfortunately. Like a lot of young Americans in their early 30s who had just bought their first piece of property, the housing bust caused us to lose the little wealth we had accumulated. But we loved where we lived, and that lessened the sting a great bit.

And what’s not to love? Our adorable condo was a mere three blocks from the Blue Line (public transit) station and just a 15-minute commute into downtown, where we both worked. I love to cook and eat good food, and in recent years, a burgeoning gourmet scene down the street is what Bon Appétit now calls Chicago’s new restaurant row. I value eating locally and organically, and the co-op at the end of my block and the Sunday farmers market made that not only possible but also easy to do. When we first bought our apartment, we weren’t married.

Then life changed. We got married in 2008 and shortly thereafter had a son. While our living quarters were more cramped, we still liked living in our little Logan Square gem. We strolled along the wide and beautiful boulevards with our baby in tow; there were at least three great parks in walking distance. We found a good home day care provider who was already taking care of my 1-year-old niece and was located just a hop, skip and a jump away. But now, when we had only driven our car on the weekends, in the interest of saving time we drove our son to day care every day even though it was only about six blocks away. We didn’t sweat it, though, because the other end of the Blue Line train station was across the street from the babysitter, and it was still a convenient commute.

However, that organic meat-share I picked up from the farmers market every other month just wasn’t cutting it, and the astronomical prices of the co-op were not an option. While the neighborhood had a mix of bodegas and chichi locavore co-ops, it didn’t have a big grocery store. So we drove to one every weekend. But we persevered – we were in our perfect place.   Then life changed again. Our daughter was born and our 3-year-old son was now ready to begin preschool. What’s more, I changed jobs and was now working from home. Our two-bedroom was no longer livable. Even though we loved it, we realized we needed more space.

Parting is such sweet sorrow

So we began the hunt for a house. The first decision we had to make was where to look. Immediately, we narrowed to Logan Square – we wanted to stay in our neighborhood. Like most well-heeled young parents in Chicago, though, the thought of navigating the lottery-based Chicago Public School system had us second-guessing our decision. Logan Square has one decent elementary school, and we did not live in its district. The school across the street from our apartment was rated as below-average, and we didn’t want to send our kids there. So we narrowed further to the area surrounding the one good school in the neighborhood. Only problem was the houses were crazy-expensive there and we just couldn’t afford it. We were being priced out of the neighborhood that we’d helped to gentrify.

We did the unthinkable and started considering the suburbs. We struck out the far-flung ones like Naperville and the like straightaway and landed on Evanston and Oak Park. There are many good reasons to live in those suburbs. They are more city-like and racially diverse than others, they have excellent schools and even the restaurants are pretty good. But as a born-and-bred Chicagoan, I couldn’t do it – those places just aren’t my city. Plus, as city-like as those suburbs are, they are still suburbs.

My husband, who grew up in multiple suburbs, hates them. The one he hates the most is Overland Park, Kan., where he spent his middle and high school years and is incidentally on Livability.com’s list of best places to raise kids. He hated it because it wasn’t diverse – and not just in its racial makeup. It was, according to him, so homogenous that it made it hard for a kid like him who wasn’t a jock, who liked punk and ska, and whose family wasn’t conservative, to thrive.

We greatly value being able to raise our mixed-race kids in a city like Chicago, which has both urban culture AND urban diversity. But was our children’s education more important than our love of Chicago? I attended very good magnet schools here that were located about an hour’s drive away from my home. Would my kids test into schools like that and, most important, did I really want that for them? We thought long and hard and decided we wanted to invest in our city. Most middle-class people with kids our age flee to the suburbs, citing the poor academic performance of CPS.

For me, it’s more complicated. There are many examples of urban families here banding together to improve neighborhood schools both for their own children and disadvantaged neighborhood children. There are all kinds of communities to be had in a city, and we are in for the long haul. And then we found our perfect house, Matt’s former home. It is perfect for every reason he listed in his blog post. While he didn’t send his daughter to the neighborhood school, it is known for being a very good area school. And it’s in walking distance. And only 12 blocks away from our former hood. But best of all, it’s just a few blocks from my sister and her family. And now my children have a big backyard to play in with their cousins. We couldn’t be happier.

Our New Best Place was originally published at Livability.com on June 24, 2014

B2B Buyer Personas Gain Positive Boost With Technology

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While persona marketing is not a new concept, rapid advances in marketing technology are enabling B2B marketers to breathe new life into their persona marketing initiatives.

“I learned the importance of buyer personas in my career at Caterpillar back 15 years ago, but they were tough to implement,” said Peter Garza, VP of the Demand Generation Center of Excellence at MedAssets, a provider of healthcare services and products. “Back then it was hard to prove that persona marketing was the right thing to do. It was a lot harder to create content specific to your buyer personas, so it was really difficult to deliver a story where the benefit/cost ratio could be justified. With the technology we now have, we can definitely boost conversions and show ROI as a result of those efforts.”

Marketing technology from a variety of vendors gives B2B marketers the tools to make sense out of both internal and third-party data, as well as unite quantitative behavioral data with such qualitative data as first-person customer interviews. As a result, B2B marketers gain much deeper insights into their buyer personas and are able to deliver more personalized and relevant customer experiences.

“A lot of marketers see personas as a way to get a ‘holistic’ view of their customers, but it’s a little bit more discrete than that,” said Adele Revella, founder of the Buyer Persona Institute. “We’re building personas to get new insight into something that matters to the buyers during this buying decision.”

Technology also provides marketers the ability to “operationalize” personas by making it easier to keep them current and embed them into other systems to target the right buyers, according to Jeff Freund, CEO of Akoonu, which provides a platform that helps marketers create and maintain buyer personas, journey maps and content planning.“How do you bring them to life? How do you really activate them across the sales and marketing organization to get the value out of them,” Freund said. “This includes things like integrating your personas into your sales and marketing systems. Going into your CRM and identifying the persona match for the leads and the contacts there, having that be part of how you report on your marketing effectiveness and efficiency. Now, there’s a process around the maintenance of personas, keeping them up-to-date and keeping them current with emerging market trends.”

Bridging The Sales And Marketing Gap

MedAssets’ Garza said before the company decided last year to focus on buyer personas, and overhaul its marketing technology infrastructure, it was “doing everything wrong.” The marketing and sales teams were not aligned, giving MedAssets little visibility into prospects’ progress in their buying journey.

So with the help of The Pedowitz Group, the company took a multichannel approach, cleaned up its data, crafted multiple buyer personas and tapped Marketo to be the central platform hub to help manage its different campaigns and touch points.

The new plan led to the creation of more than 110 pieces of pain-point-driven content — including white papers, case studies, infographics, videos and executive briefs — tailored for targeted personas across three stages of the buyer’s journey.

“We tripled the amount of leads and opportunities because the quality of our content was so much better,” Garza said. “The nice thing about using a buyer persona with the right technology is that you’re not only engaging better, but you’re engaging with the right folks. How do we add value, how do we effectively communicate and how can we, as a company, meet our customers’ needs? That’s really what it boils down to.”

While creating and leveraging buyer personas is just one peg in MedAssets strategy, it has been a critical one. The company has been able to increase its top line revenue from demand generation by almost 700% in less than a year. With personas created, buyer journeys defined and corresponding content aligned, MedAssets went from delivering ongoing reactionary email blasts to a more strategic multichannel inbound/outbound approach.

“We’ve had phenomenal results with persona-based marketing,” Garza said. “Without it, quite frankly, we wouldn’t be where we are today. The persona-based experience is the fuel for our demand-gen engine.”

Realizing Value Beyond The Marketing Department

Stephanie Fox, Senior Director of Marketing at Copyright Clearance Center, a provider of copyright licensing services, said working with persona marketing tech company Cintellenabled her to “break the personas out of the marketing department” with buy-in from top executives.

“Our CEO is really embracing it and saying as we transform our business to a tech company, let’s make sure that every person from top-to-bottom in the company knows and understands these personas,” Fox noted. “So we’re both expanding the number of personas that we need to communicate to as marketers and as sellers, but also we’re undertaking a company-wide transformation to bring personas to everybody.”

Persona marketing was not new at CCC. But previously, Fox said buyer personas “lived in these little Power Points that would get lost on our ancient fileserver,” which meant they were rarely updated and no one ever used them. But now, Cintell has updated those personas and embedded them in the company’s intranet to make them available to all CCC employees — everyone from marketing and sales to operations and engineering.

“While the product managers will continue to be the experts on the market and the customer and the customer needs, engineering is going to gain a better understanding of the ‘why’ behind the ‘what.’ Why is this a priority feature over that,” Fox said.

Fox is taking a three-phase approach with the Cintell integration. Now that employees have access to the new buyer personas, the next phase is integration with Salesforce and after that comes Pardot integration. While only the first phase is complete, the sales team has already boosted lead-gen efforts and is working much more collaboratively with marketing.

“Sales is providing a lot of really rich feedback and allowing us to update the personas on an ongoing basis,” she said. “Some of our newer sales reps are also much more successful than some traditional salespeople at CCC. Because they’re expanding the number of people they’re reaching with this new persona information, the legacy folks are starting to realize, ‘Huh. These guys might be on to something.’”

B2B Buyer Personas Gain Positive Boost With Technology was originally published at Demand Gen Report on April 13, 2016.

Mobile devices are attached to your customers, so where’s your app?

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The video, “I Forgot My Phone,” created by actress comedienne Charlene deGuzman, has gone viral in the past week. The short film has garnered more than 12 million YouTube views, mentions in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Gawker and NPR and is also being picked up by global media outlets.

The two-minute video, which documents a day-in-the-life of deGuzman to illustrate how obsessive Americans have become about their cell phones, has clearly struck a chord with mobile users around the world. The video shows that while preparing for a run, having lunch with friends and even snuggling in bed with a partner, people are engaged with their mobile. The moral of this tale is that no matter what you’re doing, your smartphone is inevitably involved.

deGuzman’s video also demonstrates the urgency that B2B marketers should be feeling about crafting their brand’s mobile strategy. And we’re not talking about just the basics—the time for baby steps has passed. While optimizing brand websites for mobile is of paramount importance, we’re at the stage where B2B marketers should be moving into the realm of developing mobile apps.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a B2B or B2C environment, you need to take into consideration how mobile has changed our customers’ behavior,” said Paul Berney, CMO and managing director-EMEA at the Mobile Marketing Association. “Our expectation is that no matter where we are, we will be able to connect and engage with brands and organizations in real time via the mobile channel—and we expect there to be a two-way dialogue and a real-time interaction. As individuals, we can’t separate ourselves out into having a different persona or mindset at work or at home or with our friends or playing sports or while commuting. We’re the same person and we have an expectation of everything being able to be done via a mobile channel. B2B marketers need to switch themselves on to that.”

Working From Home

Recent research from the Harvard Business School bears this out. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, citing Harvard’s data showing that North Americans spend 88.5 hours a week working or “monitoring” work remotely, pointed to mobile’s influence. “Mobile technology has obliterated the very idea of a set-hour workweek,” he wrote.

Despite this, changing to a mobile-first mindset will be a challenge for B2B marketers. A recent Adobe survey found almost half of digital marketers (45 percent) said their organizations don’t have a mobile-optimized site or mobile application and rely on desktop sites only. Additionally, only 7 percent have built mobile apps and a fifth (21 percent) have implemented both a mobile-optimized site and a mobile app. Moreover, only 10 percent of B2B marketers have used mobile in the past year, according to BtoB Magazine.

Nonetheless, some B2B marketers have already begun to adapt—like Juniper Networks. The  networking technology company’s VP-CMO Brad Brooks said he believes that B2B marketers need to start responding to customers in a much more B2C-oriented way, and that necessitates prioritizing mobile.

“Too often B2B marketers think about their customers as businesses, not as individuals,” Brooks said. “The consumerization of IT—or what I like to call the Apple-ization of the IT—means that more and more individuals are making decisions around their IT choices at work. Everything is now about the user experience, and how it actually applies to me and my personal job. And as that becomes more and more the norm, that informs how our customers think about buying, and how they are making their buying decisions. So being connected to them in that way and understanding how that mobile experience relates to them becomes incredibly important.”

That’s why the company in July rolled out an app, which a company spokesperson said is “first of a series of major initiatives to make our digital properties optimized for the emerging mobile, social world in which our customers and partners live.”

Juniper 1on1 enables customers to explore Juniper’s products, network architectures, services and company pages; watch videos and access datasheets, case studies and customer references; interact with Juniper’s J-Net community as well as the company’s Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages; read the latest Juniper news; and learn about product updates.

“We’ve completely redone our Web experience for mobile application use so that we can have that consumer-oriented conversation with our customers,” Brooks said. “It’s not just a mobile app on the iTunes store; we’ve actually redone the entire Web experience that our customers come to and made it feel very mobile, and taken it to a very personal level around the individual user.”

The Customer Is Always Right

This type of service-oriented, utilitarian app is a perfect example of how B2B marketers can use mobile apps, according to MMA’s Berney. He pointed to the IHS Connect app as a prime case study of another B2B marketer that brought that full Web experience to an iPad app for its oil and gas industry customers.

“Our B2B customer needs are being influenced by B2C experiences,” said Kris Howery, director of product marketing IHS Connect. “So they want the elegance, the functionality that comes with a B2C app in their B2B app experience as well. So our No. 1 guiding criteria was to make this an elegant and easy-to-use system that could go head-to-head with any of the other apps being delivered in a B2C marketplace.”

IHS, a global information company, provides industry analytics, research, forecasts and other information to executives in a range of industries. The Connect iPad app, which was launched last April, delivers business intelligence, including industry analysis of energy markets, political, regulatory and geological information, global supply and demand trends, M&A trends and country risk information, to IHS’s global oil and gas customers. The app also enables IHS customers to browse IHS insights by topic of interest, create a customized dashboard to display information based on their own unique workflow, and access insights directly from industry experts on key events impacting the global business landscape.

Howery said understanding their customers’ journey was the first step in developing the app, which has been downloaded about 5,000 times.

“We thought about how our customers work,” she said. “What we’re finding is that the hours of nine-to-five are no longer applicable in a global marketplace. We know that customers want access to the kind of information they rely on to make their business decisions in real time at their convenience. We know that they are no longer just sitting at desks, so they need access to this information in the board meeting. You want to have real-time information when you’re sitting on a call with a customer or if you’re at a customer site and you need to know something. You want to have access to this information wherever you are or happen to be.”

Berney also emphasized the importance of establishing customer’s needs at the outset of creating a mobile app strategy. To develop an app, B2B marketers must first figure out how their target audience uses mobile, which mobile devices they use and when they use them.

“B2B marketers don’t know a lot about how their target audience uses mobile,” Berney said. “They don’t know what type of mobile device their audience is using. They don’t know the mindset of their customers. You want to be able to use mobile in a contextual way, you want to the able to hit the right person with the right message at the right time and the right place and that’s the best of what mobile does.”

Howery said it’s all about B2B marketers putting themselves in their clients’ position to determine how they engage and how they work. She also urged marketers to leave fear behind.

“This [reluctance to adopt mobile] is about not wanting to change,” she said. “If the goal is getting from point one to point two, why change? But as competitors come in and there is further development in the space, B2B marketers will be forced to change. We have to learn to adapt quicker.”

Howery is correct in her assessment. As deGuzman’s video illustrates, mobile is reshaping our workforce and changing how we all relate to one another, for better or worse. And B2B marketers have to grab hold of this fact if they want to continue to reach customers and prospects.

“Mobile has changed our behavior irrevocably,” Berney said. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Once people know it is possible to, for example, get their bank balance in real time, why can’t they access data in real time in a B2B environment? There’s simply no excuse.”

Mobile devices are attached to your customers, so where’s your app? was originally published at FierceCMO on Aug. 27, 2013

Country Music Legend Merle Haggard Dies at 79

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Merle Haggard, one of the original country and western music outlaws, has died today, his birthday, at the age of 79.

Haggard’s more than 50-year career spawned almost 40 No. 1 hits and 70 albums. Along with Buck Owens, he is also one of the progenitors of the Bakersfield Sound, which merges Western swing, honky tonk, rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll.

“Merle Ronald Haggard remains, with the arguable exception of Hank Williams, the single most influential singer-songwriter in country music history,” said the Country Music Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 1994.

Recently Haggard postponed his March tour after being hospitalized for pneumonia, which he had battled for months. The country star’s poor health had already led to several canceled concerts. Right before he nixed his February concert dates, Haggard told Rolling Stone about his fight with pneumonia:

“I had a pain that went all the way around from my belly button all the way around to my back. I asked the doctor, ‘What was that pain?’ He said it was death.”

Merle Haggard’s Early Years

Long known as a champion of the working man, Haggard’s music has almost always spoken up for the underdog – the convicts, drunks and losers of the world. “I sometimes feel like I’m standing up for the people that don’t have the nerve to stand up for themselves,” he told GQ in 2012. “I just enjoyed winning for the loser. I’d never been around anything except losers my whole life.”

Merle Haggard in 1975
Merle Haggard in 1975

Haggard was born on April 6, 1937, in Bakersfield, California. His parents, who moved from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression, raised him in an old train boxcar that had been converted into a home. When he was 12 years old, Haggard’s older brother gave him a guitar, which he taught himself to play by listening to records.

Even though country musicians inspired him as a teenager, particularly Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams, he just couldn’t stay out of trouble. Haggard’s criminal record was a mile long – including such offenses as truancy, passing phony checks and grand theft auto – and he was in and out of jail throughout his teen years. When he wasn’t in jail, he was busy playing in local bars and clubs.

Haggard’s Prison Years and Beyond

All that bad behavior caught up with Haggard and in 1958 he was sent to San Quentin prison after being convicted of burglary and an attempt to escape from county jail. While he was locked up, serving a 15-year term, he saw Johnny Cash perform on New Year’s Day.

Merle Haggard Performing in June 2009
Merle Haggard Performing in June 2009

“He had the right attitude,” Haggard said of Cash. “He chewed gum, looked arrogant and flipped the bird to the guards — he did everything the prisoners wanted to do. He was a mean mother from the South who was there because he loved us. When he walked away, everyone in that place had become a Johnny Cash fan.”

Seeing Cash’s performance reportedly inspired Haggard to play country music and take high school equivalency courses. Haggard was later given a full pardon in 1972 by then-governor Ronald Reagan.

When he got out of prison in 1960, Haggard went back to Bakersfield and worked a day job digging ditches. At night he played lead guitar in a local band, and by 1962 he was on his way to Las Vegas – and a long and successful music career – to back singer Wynn Stewart. He signed with Tally Records and recorded his debut single “Sing a Sad Song,” which rose to No. 19 on the country charts. By 1965, Haggard had formed a band, The Strangers, and signed with Capitol Records. Later that year, the band released their debut self-titled album. In 1967 their single, “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” hit the top of the country charts, followed by No. 1 “Branded Man.”

After a streak of No. 1 singles, Haggard released in 1969 his most famous – and controversial – song “Okie from Muskogee,” which celebrated patriotism and traditional values at a time when the Vietnam War was being vigorously protested by young people across the country.

“We were in a wonderful time in America and music was in a wonderful place. America was at its peak and what the hell did these kids have to complain about? These soldiers were giving up their freedom and lives to make sure others could stay free. I wrote the song to support those soldiers,” he once said.

Country Music Legend Merle Haggard Dies at 79 was originally published at Reverb on April 6, 2016.

Chronic Pain and the Working Musician

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Severe chronic pain has left Joshua Trost, guitarist for The Feral Americans, unable to perform publicly. “My hand problem has prevented us from even doing much practicing,” Trost says. “We’re pretty much in limbo right now because of it.”

Trost, 41, has played guitar since he was 13 years old. Three years ago, with no blood or drama, he debilitated his hand while unscrewing a speaker from a cabinet. “I had an overuse injury I made worse,” Trost says. “I couldn’t even hold a toothbrush or turn a doorknob after it happened. I’m certain that had I not played guitar, I would not have experienced the degree of injury that I did.”

As many as 80% of musicians suffer from playing-related pain, according to research.

Trost has good reason to believe his chronic pain is related to guitar playing. As many as 80% of musicians suffer from playing-related pain, according to a survey of 330 incoming freshman at a school of music conducted by the medical journal “Medical Problems of Performing Artists,” in 2009. And playing-related pain can begin early for musicians of all stripes.

Dr. Daniel Ivankovich, orthopedic surgeon, blues musician and cofounder of One Patient Global Health Initiative, a nonprofit that has treated more than 100,000 uninsured or underinsured patients in Chicago, says musicians should be concerned about preventing repetitive strain injury in their hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders and back.

“Our whole philosophy, at least in my practice, is prevention,” says Ivankovich, who was recently named a 2015 Top 10 CNN Hero for his nonprofit work. “Repetitive and chronic wear-and-tear can absolutely be prevented in younger musicians by them just using their brain and thinking about how to save and preserve their body.”

Find a Fit

Most guitars were designed and built with right-handed men in mind, which may cause problems for lefties and those with smaller hands, Ivankovich says. So the first step in preventing injury is to make sure your instrument is fitted properly.

As a musician, you don’t just need to know your music, you need to know your physical requirements and limitations.

“There used to be very few choices, but these days there are actually lines of guitars that have been more fitted for women, making a body that is a little smaller, making a neck that is a little thinner and a little easier to play for small hands,” Ivankovich says, so find a guitar that fits you well and don’t settle for less. “If you’re struggling to play a guitar that doesn’t fit your hands, it is a setup for motion repetitive strain and associated injuries,” Ivankovich says. “As a musician, you don’t just need to know your music, you need to know your physical requirements and limitations. You need to be able express yourself in the most effortless kind of way,” he says.

Know Your Limits

Many musicians give themselves back and shoulder problems with poor posture while standing or sitting for hours while on stage, lugging around heavy equipment and practicing without breaks, Ivankovich explains, so knowing your physical limitations is important for avoiding injury.

In addition to making sure you are in good physical condition, he suggests doing warm-up and cool-down stretches; strengthening core muscles; taking frequent breaks and not sitting slumped over guitars slung between your knees. But, most of all, stop playing if you are in pain, Ivankovich says.

Trost reported that even before he injured his hand with the screwdriver, he endured hand pain and tingling after long hours of session work. “I was playing bass in a country cover band and their guitarist left. We were in the middle of recording sessions, so I got bumped up to play guitar,” he says. “When I was doing double duty, sometimes I would be playing for four hours two or three times a week. After those sessions, my left hand in particular would just be so sore,” he says.

Serves You Right to Suffer

After Trost injured his hand, he wore a brace for a month and did not play on the advice of an emergency room physician. After that month was over, he started playing again and developed a localized pain in the center of his palm, between the middle and ring fingers and the ring and pinkie area. In a perfect world, he would have seen a doctor. But like many musicians, playing gigs did not pay all the bills and Trost did not have health insurance. However, he has had some relief due to coverage via the Affordable Care Act.

Some guitar players will not see a doctor because they automatically assume a physician will recommend surgery, Ivankovich says. However, most respond well to therapy, scheduling and wearing a simple brace or splint to mitigate pain and can avoid going under the knife.

“With any sort of a hand or wrist symptoms, what we’ll do is try activity modification,” Ivankovich says. “Stop playing guitar for eight hours straight. Maybe break it up and play one hour at a time. If that doesn’t work, take a couple of days off and give it a rest. What we try to do is create a temporal history of when things are made worse, how they’re made better and then we’ll adjust the treatment plan accordingly.”

Meanwhile, as Trost waits for a diagnosis, he has adjusted how he plays. He has moved to lighter gauge strings and guitars with shorter scale necks, and the band has tuned down to lower string tension. “The message I’d leave with young musicians is that you may manage to secure your ideal guitars, amps and equipment, but they are all absolutely meaningless unless you can play them,” he says.

Flashback Friday: Chronic Pain and the Working Musician originally published at Reverb on Oct. 26, 2015

What Google Analytics 360 Means For B2B Marketers

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Young female entrepreneur working in a home office

Google shook up the marketing world last week with the limited beta release of Google Analytics 360, an enterprise marketing suite that melds the company’s existing Analytics Premium and Adometry services with four brand-new tools.

“The fact that Google is now making a commitment to marketing as a function is a very big deal,” said IDC Research Manager Gerry Murray. “Google made its brand on the advertising side of the house, and now they’re finally coming to marketing and saying we can do a lot more than just analytics.”

The suite, which is designed to help marketers understand both online and offline customer habits, is comprised of six products, including the former GA Premium and Adometry, rebranded as Attribution 360. Rounding out the suite is Audience Center 360, a data management platform that integrates with Google and DoubleClick; Optimize 360, which is designed to create multiple variations of a website for different audiences; Data Studio 360, a data visualization product that can integrate data across all the products within the suite; and Tag Manager 360, which provides data collection and APIs to increase data accuracy.

“It is a game changer in my view,” said Christine Nurnberger, CMO of Bottomline Technologies, a provider of payments and invoice automation software. “On the surface, Google Optimize 360, for example, looks like it just offers regular A/B and multivariate testing, but it goes far, far deeper. It allows marketers to create experiences around content at a much more granular level, and then track the ROI through the online buy cycle. Though it is geared to enterprise that’s on the B2C side, the ability to get my arms around the customer journey and customer personas based on much more robust analytics is very cool.”

The new suite will enable marketers to import their own first-party data, add third-party data and leverage Google data to develop audience segments for campaign targeting. The upshot, according to Google, is that marketers will have the ability to deliver much more useful experiences, tailored specifically to each customer.

“In B2B today, we use tools like Marketo to understand what people are looking at in terms of our content, and how they’re responding and interacting with our content in our campaign,” Nurnberger said. “But what we don’t understand is what they’re doing on the rest of the Internet, and what they’re researching and how they’re approaching their buy cycle outside of what we might be providing to them. This is going to give us that capability. I’m interested in pricing, which rumor has it, is going to be expensive.”

Not Built With B2B In Mind

Though Nurnberger is one of the B2B marketers singing praises, Demandbase CMO Peter Isaacson said the announcement highlights Google’s lack of investment on the B2B side.

“Google is continuing to neglect B2B because so much of this announcement is wrapped up in a B2C focus,” he said. “Even if you look at some of the types of data customers that they highlight in the release — Progressive and L’Oreal — they’re all B2C. I’m not sure that this solution was built with B2B marketers in mind, even though there are some B2B marketers that might jump on the DMP, [or] might jump onto the testing tool.”

Although IDC’s Murray agreed that Google’s 360 Analytics suite will have less of an impact in the pure-play B2B marketing industry, he said the release is a “boon to all marketers,” including proponents of account-based marketing in B2B.

“Account-based marketing is really all about helping sales expand the scope of their opportunity assessments in the account and connecting to new decision-makers in different parts of the business,” he said. “Marketing can — when it’s done right and you have the good, full, multidimensional view of these contacts within the accounts — help you start to make pretty good inferences around who’s the next best team to go sell and expand your solution to.”

Google said the suite was built with four goals in mind: providing marketers with a complete view of the customer journey; delivering more insights, rather than more data, from analytics tools; making data more integrated and accessible; and giving marketers the ability to use data analytics to improve marketing and consumer experiences.

While the company touts the suite’s ability to be easily integrated with a wide range of its own and third-party software, Nurnberger doesn’t think it goes far enough. Her “Holy Grail” is to get a complete understanding of how far her marketing dollar stretches, as well as have a holistic view of customers at every touch point.

“In theory, it’s going to take content marketing to a more personalized, real-time place, which is great. But what I wish they would do is talk more about the integration between this set of solutions and marketing automation or sales force automation,” she said. “This gets us a little bit closer in terms of the ability to control and analyze and optimize the touch points we have with them through Google versus passively just serving up ad words, but it doesn’t then connect the dots back into Marketo or Salesforce.com for that true 360-[degree] view of the customer.”

Competition In The Cloud

With this launch, Google also seems to be challenging several big players in the enterprise data cloud or DMP space, including, Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce. “It’s a bit of a crisis for some of their key competitors,” said IDC’s Murray.

However, in a research note, Pivotal Research Analyst Brian Wieser said that while Google 360 Analytics will increase competition, it poses no immediate threat to more-established marketing cloud providers.

“Most importantly for the broader marketing technology space, success from Google does not necessarily harm incumbents,” he said. “Instead, we think expanded efforts from Google will probably help to grow the broader sector, which has substantial upside given the untapped potential associated with bringing more technology to marketing functions.”

Adobe and Salesforce declined to comment, but Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Director of Product Marketing Rebecca Kaykas-Wolff pointed out that the centerpiece of Google’s new offering, which is still in beta, is a repackaging of an existing offering.

“Oracle’s positioning is that we believe marketers should take a best in breed approach to their advertising tech stack that solves a broad array of monetization tactics across channels,” she said. “We believe that advertisers need to have open platforms that allow for breadth capabilities to serve all ad type products (display, search, social, video, mobile, etc.), as well as ensure agnostic performance and reporting capabilities. We would question how Google would deliver agnostic and multichannel view given their focus on ‘Search’ at the core of their strategy. We are truly open.”

 

What Google Analytics 360 Means For B2B Marketers was originally published at Demand Gen Report on March 23, 2016.

Why my family is betting on Chicago — and its public schools

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I am a Chicagoan through and through.

So when my husband and I decided to buy a house, it was only natural for us to look for a house here in the city. And that’s where we ended up — in a house in Irving Park three times the size of our tiny Logan Square condo.

When we began house hunting, the first decision we had to make was where to look. Immediately, we narrowed to our beloved Logan Square. Like most well-heeled young parents in Chicago, though, the thought of navigating the lottery-based Chicago Public School system had us second-guessing. Logan Square has one decent elementary school, and we did not live in its district. The school across the street was rated below-average, and we didn’t want to send our kids there. So we narrowed further to the area surrounding the one good school in the neighborhood but we just couldn’t afford the houses there.

So we did the unthinkable and started considering the suburbs. We struck out the far-flung ones such as Naperville and the like straightaway and landed on Evanston and Oak Park. While there are many good reasons to live in those suburbs — they are more city-like and racially diverse than others, they have excellent schools and even pretty good restaurants — we are just not suburbanites. We greatly value being able to raise our mixed-race kids in a city like Chicago, which has both urban culture and diversity.

But was our children’s education more important than our love of Chicago? I attended an excellent elementary magnet school here — Decatur Classical — that was located about an hour away from my home. Would my kids test into schools like that and, most important, did I really want that for them? Decatur was pretty intense.

A TWO-PART QUESTION

We thought long and hard and decided we wanted to invest in our city. Most middle-class people with kids our age flee to the suburbs, citing the poor academic performance of CPS. Others break the bank to live in the district of better-performing public schools or send their children to private schools. For us, it’s more complicated. The two-part question that we were left with when we were making this decision was could families like ours with two educated, middle-class parents have a positive impact on city schools? Could our participation improve them not just for our own children, but for other children as well?

My husband and I decided that the answer to that question was yes. There are many examples of urban middle-class families uniting to improve public schools both for their own children, as well as for neighborhood children. I believe the more of us that can commit to that, the more we can demand excellence and help struggling schools get there. And after sending our preschool-age son to a neighborhood school for the past year, I think they get a bum rap — now there is evidence to back that up. A recent Chicago Sun-Times analysis of “MAP” test results showed that Chicago Public School test scores, especially in reading, outpace those of charter schools, which are a pet project of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The mayor loves charter schools so much that he has funded them at the expense of our city’s public schools. Perhaps more middle-class parents could be convinced to also invest in CPS if he showed that same kind of allegiance to our public schools.

While we won’t enroll our children in a failing school (we’re not that altruistic), there are plenty of good neighborhood schools in the city; there is even one in walking distance of our new affordable house. We also know that a school is not the end-all, be-all of raising intelligent, engaged children. The commitment of family and friends to the education and growth of children is powerful in combination with dedicated teachers that many neighborhood schools can offer. There are all kinds of communities to be had in a city, and we are in for the long haul.

Tequia Burt is a native Chicagoan and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Her day job is as the editor of FierceCMO, a digital publication targeted 

 

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Originally published in Crain’s Chicago Business September 2014

Roots of Rock and the Chitlin Circuit

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By Tequia Burt

In an era when African Americans sat at the back of the bus and were banned from “Whites Only” establishments, the so-called Chitlin Circuit flourished. Driven by the entrenched racial segregation of the Jim Crow era, the circuit gave comics like Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor their first shots at infamy and it provided playwrights like August Wilson with an engaged audience. It also gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll music.

“The Chitlin Circuit was almost an entirely African-American phenomenon,” says the author of “The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Preston Lauterbach. “We’re talking about the black music business – black performers, black audiences – run by predominantly black businesspeople with a few whites in the mix. The circuit was basically the African-American segment of the entertainment industry during the days of segregation.”


A Juke Joint in the Chitlin Circuit

The circuit gave the architects of blues-fueled rock ‘n’ roll their start – icons like Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix and the Isley Brothers – in predominantly southern, black-only nightclubs. Even Gladys Knight performed in a house band on the circuit early in her career, playing at what she called “roadside joints and honky tonks across the South. No menus. No kitchens. Just a grizzly old guy selling catfish nuggets, corn fritters or pig ear sandwiches in a corner.”

And in the South, that’s exactly where black musicians played: hole-in-the-wall clubs, juke joints and roadside shacks. However, even though much of the circuit was located in the South, its origins can also be traced to big northern cities where pockets of African-Americans had migrated: The Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club in Harlem; the Regal Theatre in Chicago; the Uptown Theatre in Philadelphia; the Royal Theatre in Baltimore; and the Fox Theatre in Detroit were all considered a part of the network.

The Regal Theatre in Chicago

 

According to Ali Colleen Neff, assistant professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech and author of “Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story,” the Chitlin Circuit provided black musicians and performers, locked out of the mainstream white music industry, safe venues and an audience willing to go beyond convention. Black musicians could do things in front of a black audience that they couldn’t do in front of a white one. As they transformed southern rhythm and blues into a sound no one had ever heard, black performers had juke joints jumping as they swiveled their hips, growled into their mics and pounded their instruments.

“Black audiences in the circuit were highly participatory in creating these new genres,” Neff says. “You didn’t play anything to a black audience – who were often interested in empowering new, emerging forms of music – if they weren’t encouraging you to do it.”

The Bo Diddley Beat

It was on the Chitlin Circuit in the 1950s and ’60s that Bo Diddley fine-tuned his famous Bo Diddley beat, which is widely credited as the rhythm that makes up the backbone of rock ‘n’ roll music. While the syncopated beat, made up of three strokes/rest/two strokes (bomp-ba-domp-ba-domp, ba-domp-domp), is firmly rooted in African American slave culture, it can also be traced to drumbeats of the Yoruba and Kongo cultures.

“I mainly play chords and stuff like that and rhythm. I’m a rhythm fanatic,” Diddley said in “Rock & Roll,” the 1995 PBS series. “I played the guitar as if I were playing drums. That’s the thing that makes my music so different. I do licks on a guitar like a drummer would do.”

Bo Diddley – “Hey Bo Diddley”

 

Diddley was not shy about experimenting on the circuit. He had women in his band; he played a rectangular guitar and included unconventional instruments like electric violins, maracas and washboards. And that famous beat went on influence everyone from Buddy Holly and Elvis to Bruce Springsteen and The Smiths. However, despite his massive impact, Diddley could never quite cross over to white audiences. George R. White, author of “Bo Diddley: Living Legend,” wrote: “Diddley remained firmly rooted in the ghetto. Both his music and his image were too loud, too raunchy, too black ever to cross over.” Even though white teenagers played his records on jukeboxes, radio station deejays were less enthusiastic. As were TV and movie execs.

Crossing Over

While black musicians were able to innovate while touring the circuit, many realized that the real money was made playing to whites. Little Richard, who had worked the circuit for years, at one point touring in drag as Princess Lavonne in Sugarfoot Sam’s Minstrel Show, achieved breakthrough success in 1955 with “Tutti Frutti.” The hit was a sanitized version of a dirty ditty that he performed often on the circuit: “Tutti Frutti/Good booty/If it don’t fit/Don’t force it/You can grease it/Make it easy.” Little Richard knew those lyrics just wouldn’t fly in front of a white audience.

“People called rock & roll ‘African music.’ They called it ‘voodoo music,’” Little Richard told Rolling Stone in 2010. “They said that it would drive the kids insane. They said that it was just a flash in the pan.”

Little Richard – “Tutti Frutti”

 

Much to the chagrin of their scandalized parents, white teenagers went crazy over flamboyant, pancake-makeup-wearing Little Richard. His more-wholesome adaptation of “Tutti Frutti” sold more than a million copies.

“I was the first black artist whose records the white kids were starting to buy. And the parents were really bitter about me,” Little Richard added. “We played places where they told us not to come back, because the kids got so wild. They were tearing up the streets and throwing bottles and jumping off the theater balconies at shows. At that time, the white kids had to be up in the balcony – they were ‘white spectators.’ But then they’d leap over the balcony to get downstairs where the black kids were.”

Chitlin Circuit frontmen like Little Richard were instrumental in spreading rock ‘n’ roll to mainstream white America, but hardworking sidemen also had a part to play. The most successful to cross over was Jimi Hendrix.

After his discharge from the Army in 1962, Hendrix earned a living as a sideman for a few years, working for greats like Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and the Isley Brothers. By 1964, he was playing lead guitar for the Isley’s, recording the song “Testify.” Hendrix also played guitar for their single “Move On Over and Let Me Dance.” However, he left the Isleys, and the circuit, for good in 1965.

It was in the circuit that Hendrix was able to refine the style that made him famous, including playing solos with his teeth and behind his back on a right-handed guitar turned upside down and restrung for a lefty. He also sharpened his guitar-playing skills and perfected his sound, which was built on a foundation of rhythm and blues.

“It was a real place to be a professional musician, to learn, to grow as a performer, to evolve, to get better, to exchange ideas,” Lauterbach says. “There was no such thing as a media-made Chitlin’ Circuit star – there was no Chitlin’ Circuit idol, there was no corporation getting behind an individual. They had to get out there and kick ass every single night or they were screwed. It was a real survival-of-the-fittest type situation that forced the artist to be good, to be competitive in order to be able to make a living.”

Rare footage of Hendrix backing Nashville soul act Buddy and Stacy on the local TV show “Night Train” in 1965

 

The mainstream success of artists like Little Richard and Hendrix, coupled with the Civil Rights movement and desegregation, led to the Chitlin’ Circuit’s downfall. While it still survives today, featuring predominantly R&B acts like Bobby Rush, Clarence Carter and Denise LaSalle, it’s nothing like it was in its heyday in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

“The Chitlin Circuit has always been a tremendous source of pride for black musicians. It was never second best; it was where all of the best musicians were,” Lauterbach says. “Crossing over was always a way to make a better living, but the quality of the entertainment was absolutely second-to-none because it was where innovation took place, where new styles were made. This wasn’t any kind of backdoor situation at all; it was black-owned and black-operated for black audiences. Nothing second class about it.”

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Originally published January 2016 on Reverb.com

Why Little League International is wrong about Jackie Robinson West

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Bloomberg
Members of the Jackie Robinson West baseball team at a rally in Chicago in August.

 

By Tequia Burt

Getting up yesterday morning to see the Jackie Robinson West team stripped of its U.S. Little League Championship title was like a knife to the heart.

Like millions of Chicagoans, I cheered them on and rooted for our South Side team to go all the way. Even though the boys did not win the world title, to people across the city they still were our champs. Our boys were the first African-American team to win a Little League Championship.

And we all needed it—the black community, in particular, needed it. They won the title during a time of great pain, when black boys felt like their lives didn’t matter. They filled our terror-filled psyches with hope. We took a collective breath—our sons can be role models; they aren’t just criminals in hoodies stealing cigarillos. Then this happened.

And now they’re cheaters. Because, according to Little League International CEO Stephen Keener, at least two kids lived outside sanctioned boundaries.

Instead of being heroes, now they’re a “superteam,” fitting neatly into the narrative of black males as brutes imbued with superhuman strength. Innocence has been lost.

WHAT ABOUT THE NFL?

At a time when Deflategate is happening and MLB players admit to doping, these children are being told that they are learning a good lesson: Cheaters never win. In reality, the lesson they are learning is that cheaters don’t win unless they are powerful. Black boys are not powerful. And I’m pretty sure they are well aware that mistakes can cost them.

These children are being held to stricter standards than the NFL holds its teams and players: Even though 11 of 12 footballs the Patriots used in the AFC Championship were deflated, even though they are widely thought of as cheaters,the team went on to win the Super Bowl. No one is threatening to vacate their title.

While the adults in the Little League scandal have been appropriately punished, it still doesn’t change the fact that these children are being reprimanded for being successful. They were failed by their coaches, by the Little League organization and, even, by some parents. Yet they are the ones paying the ultimate price.

The Little League did not make the right decision by stripping JRW of its championship title. There are reports that Little League International knew that multiple Little League teams in the area violate boundary rules as a matter of course, including the Evergreen Park league, whose coach worked hard to get JRW stripped of its title.

If the rules were so important, why did the organization only begin the investigation after JRW won and someone complained and a reporter forced the issue? Eligibility should have been established long before any team played in the finals. If rules really mattered, this level of scrutiny should be placed on all the teams all over the country—from the get-go. The organization’s framework for evaluating residency is clearly flawed since JRW previously was cleared of wrongdoing.

The children should not be the ones made to suffer the consequences. Black boys are so often made into the bogeyman; let them be heroes for once.

So now it’s time to express our support, Chicago. We have to let these children know that they aren’t the ones to blame even though they’re being penalized. Let’s show the children in JRW that they’re still champs.

 

Tequia Burt is a native Chicagoan and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Her day job is as editor of FierceCMO, a digital publication targeted to B2B marketers.

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Originally published in Crain’s Chicago Business Feb. 12, 2015