NextStage Membership

Second: Membership includes some obvious benefits

• 25% discount on everything in The NextStage KnowledgeShop
• Kindle versions of all NextStage books free with confirmation of print version purchase
• Chance to beta test tools
• Early warnings of tool releases
• Chance to guide NextStage Research
• Chance to be a first reader of NextStage material
• Chance to guide NextStage Tool Development
• (more as we think of things or people ask)

• Conference presentation(s)
  • The NHHTC - MIT Enterprise Forum 8 May 2003 (the presentation mentioned in Reading Virtual Minds V1: Science and History
  • 16 Jan 2002 Presentation to Lawyers (and did we look different back then!)
• Podcasts - NextStage 1 Minute MarketLift podcasts are free to all members. More are being added each week and all are based on research proven in real world situations. Topics range from Branding to Social to Self-Marketing and beyond.
• Research brief(s)
  • Designing Messages to Penetrate Millennial Audiences
  • Games as Conversion Vectors (posted 23 Aug 2012)
  • Healthy Social Networks Require Specific Contributor-Population Ratios and Vital Information Gradients
  • Promoting Influencers in Social Networks
  • Rare Events as Harbingers of Social Network Shifts
  • Social Message Radiation Maximized When Secondary Knowledge Sources Validate Original Message
  • The Heart as a Dollar Sign - Determining the Dollar versus Social Value of Loves, Likes, Followers, Fans, etc in the Online World
  • The Importance of Influencers v Lurkers in Inciting Social Networks to Act
  • The Relationship Between Product Release/Announcement/Introduction and Social Network Response - Control Issues
• Beta Tool(s)
  • NextStage Client Prospector:

    The NextStage Client Prospector creates a psychological, behavioral, motivational profile ({C,B/e,M} matrix) of you based on your visits to all sites running our technology (we're in over 70 countries at present and many of our installations only update us every month so if we don't have you yet, chances are we will) and matches that against the {C,B/e,M} matrix of all businesses in our system.

    The result is a match of businesses where You, not your product, offering, service, et cetera, are most likely to succeed. As sales and marketing is all about human-human interaction, knowing where you will be welcomed is a good thing, yes?

  • NextStage Immediate Sentiment:

    NextStage Immediate Sentiment analyzes visitor interaction with sites in "real-time" and determines seven visitor "sentiment" factors:

    Visitors

    • Think it's good
    • Believe it's good
    • Feel it's good
    • Are neutral
    • Think it's bad
    • Believe it's bad
    • Feel it's bad

  • NextStage Predictive Echo:

    The NextStage Predictive Echo Tool helps you

    • Determine why past web marketing efforts failed
    • Determine how past web marketing efforts failed
    • Develop actionable present and future marketing efforts

    The NextStage Predictive Echo Tool was developed in response to conversations NextStage has been having with clients, web analysts, developers, designers and the like. A common request was for a tool which could go through past data - web analytics and server log extracts - in order to determine valid design "next steps".

    The outcome of these conversations and research is the NextStage Predictive Echo Tool. The term "Predictive Echo" comes from an individual's ability to send a message and have a good idea of what the response will be. Two people engaged in conversation are actually broadcasting signals back and forth to each other. The more the signals broadcasted are echoed back, the more the two people understand, trust and can work with each other to mutual benefit.

    NextStage Predictive Echo Tool is a simple tool that determines several aspects of user behavior and outputs key behavioral drivers for use in:

    • New and redesign efforts
    • Developing marketing strategies
    • Developing media strategies
    • Developing web strategies
    • New product planning

    Elements of this tool were described in Mapping Personae to Outcomes and Responding to "Can behavioral targeting operate more seamlessly across media borders?"

  • NextStage Veritas Gauge:

    The NextStage Veritas Gauge provides a measure of two website visitor psycho-behavioral elements:

    • Are visitors responding truthfully in forms, content entry, et cetera?
    • Are visitors comfortable with (not threatened by) the information provided on the site?

  • NextStage OnLine Optimizer (was WebSite Optimizer):

    The NextStage Online Optimizer Tool (was "WebSite Optimizer") gives you

    • Clearly actionable design suggestions
    • Based entirely on visitors interaction with your site
    • And does so without collecting any personally identifiable data

    The NextStage Online Optimizer is a response to several conversations NextStage has been having with analysts, developers, designers and the like. All conversations revolve around a few points:

    • The standard, currently available analytics are too complicated
    • You always need someone to explain what they mean
    • There's rarely any actionable items and when there are, they take a very global form (Ex: "Find ways to promote (e.g. SEO, Paid Search, Email, etc) the products that turn viewers into applicants." Really? Dang, I wish we'd thought of that! Umm...Mind telling me which one?)
    • Every vendor has different terms for the same thing or they have the same term for different things

    Aspects of these conversations appeared in NextStage CRO Joseph Carrabis' blog in the Noisy Data arc.

    The outcome of these conversations and research is The NextStage Online Optimizer, a simple tool that indicates the online health of your online along with 1-3 action items for improving your online's ROI. This tool can recommend up to six action items and, based on conversations, only 1-3 will be listed at any point in time. The last recommendation the Optimizer will give is that it's time to upgrade to more advanced reporting.

• Marketing paper(s):
  • NSE Consumer Research Paper - The Selling Face: A Study of Face and Body Biases in Marketing Communications, Part 1 Results

...sometime in 2011 ETv2 will be online. Reading Virtual Minds readers know this means ET will be "thinking" like a 5-7yo and into 2nd Stage Learning. One of the requirements for 2nd Stage Learning is having individuals -- humans -- that are not part of the "family" directly and intentionally interact with the "child".

Our method for doing this is to have individuals (again, we prefer humans) decide if they want to directly and intentionally interact with ET, hence Membership. Members will be able to directly and intentionally impress themselves onto ET's system, meaning people can directly enter images (so far, images. Not flash, not video, etc) and content and have ET respond basically as if all our tools were working simultaneously.

We hope this appeals to some. We also need to warn you that ET can be a precocious and forthright child. If ET thinks you're a daft ass and refuses further interaction with you, so it goes. There will be no refunds because Membership includes other premiums as listed above. On the other hand, ET may decide you're lots of fun and prefer your company over other members. Again, you'll need to demonstrate restraint to ET and let it know you're not going to play with it 24x7. ET has been remarkably adept at deciding who should work for NextStage, now it will be smart enough to pick its own friends (as it doesn't have a nose, we figure picking friends is enough).

It has been said that it takes a whole village to raise a child. When that child is a Symbiotic CyberSemiotic System, it takes a whole village and then some.