Industry news! And member news! We love sharing!

4 Tips For Authentic Online Engagement
Don’t Just Network, Talk Up Boston
Pinterest vs. Google+: Which New Social Network Is Worth Marketers' Time?

Arnold Powers the Boston Bruins’ “The Bear and the Gang” Integrated Campaign
Corey McPherson Nash Selected to Develop Ad Campaign for Atlantic Broadband
Fresh Tilled Soil Redesigns Site for Hot Startup GymPact
Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast on How Spam and the Cloud Can Save the Future of Email
Fiksu Expands with Northampton Office

This guest blog post is by Alison Savery, an inbound marketing manager at HubSpot. HubSpot is an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA.

Smarketing, or closed-loop marketing, is the alignment and integration of Sales and Marketing. Since there’s a lot of overlap between these two revenue generating powerhouses, it’s critical to be sure they are aligned and agree on common goals. When this is not the case and goals are missed, it’s typical for these two groups to battle it out and point blame at one another. Marketing will accuse Sales of not working their leads deeply enough, and Sales will complain that Marketing is generating low-quality leads. By improving Smarketing and solidifying common goals between the two groups, you’ll spend less time bickering and more time closing business.

Guest post by John Francis. John is a former 3-term MITX board member, a DropBox user (not an investor or an employee), an advisor to several early stage technology firms, and a consultant to several software and technology firms. He can be reached at jfrancis@ontios.com

Enterprise software is complex, DropBox is simple.
Enterprise software is functionally robust, DropBox single-purpose.
Enterprise software is sold, DropBox infiltrates.  

DropBox is for individuals and small teams – but it is used throughout organization of all shapes and sizes.

DropBox isn’t sold so much as it is adopted.

It isn’t sanctioned so much as it sidesteps what is sanctioned.

As a veteran of both the software and technology marketing world, I am intrigued by applications like DropBox that grow virally without some overdone marketing campaign or an application interface that is so overwhelmed by extraneous features that it’s not clear what benefit the application provides to its users.   

Simplicity wins.  

Are there other more robust applications available in DropBox’s market? Absolutely. But droves of users are embracing the clean interface, simple functional model and friendly pricing. In many ways this embrace of simplicity within the enterprise is a natural outgrowth of the “Consumerization of the Enterprise.” Whether driven by the embrace of Salesforce by enterprises that had previously relied on older, more robust software like Siebel’s CRM solution, or developers embracing Amazon’s AWS platform, simplicity is the driving force in the enterprise. And it is clearly the driving force within the adoption of DropBox.  

Which is not to say that DropBox is trivial – quite the contrary, it takes more thought, effort and development prowess to create functionally useful, albeit simple to use applications than it does to create bloated software that has no clear concept of its intended user. Simple software is not the same thing as trivial software.  

From a business perspective, the creation of intuitive software that can be sold and supported cost- effectively opens up opportunities that have typically given software companies tremendous difficulties – the transition from interesting to ubiquitous. While Steve Jobs may have (purportedly) dismissed DropBox as a feature (and the evolution of Apple’s iCloud may yet prove this to be true), to this point their growth has been phenomenal and their reported valuation has gone up into a very interesting neighborhood.  Simplicity isn’t just a user benefit, it can also be a profound source of competitive advantage.  

Simplicity delivers value to both the vendor and the user.  

Meanwhile, legacy enterprise software vendors grapple with client satisfaction issues, the transition to the cloud, the implications of SaaS licensing and the long experienced, seldom addressed issue of “time to benefit.”  Keep it up DropBox, whether you are the tool of choice by virtue of a corporate decision or in spite of a corporate decision.  

Postscript:  Having finished this note the day before DropBox released the update to their solution, I am interested to see how DropBox’s changes are embraced. While not revolutionary, they do seek to put DropBox on the road toward offering a more robust solution.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held this year in Las Vegas, is the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow. South by Southwest (SXSW) held annually in Austin, Texas, is a series of film, interactive, and music festivals that has grown exponentially since it began in 1987. What do these shows have in common? They’re massively important to our industry, but the majority of us don’t have the resources or time to attend. Before you're get all frowny face about this, we have good news: it IS possible to learn from these events remotely! Thursday’s panelists broke down why, how, and what we can learn from CES and SXSW – without leaving our desks.

David Shing, Digital Prophet, AOL moderated a panel of experts: Steve Brennan, Senior Vice President, Technology & Production, Digital Influence Group; Mike Schneider, Senior Vice President, Director Digital Incubator, Allen & Gerritsen; Jim Barry, Spokesman at CEA and Owner, JMBarry; and Adam Kasper, EVP, Digital Investments, HAVAS Digital.

Some newses! From this week in the Twitterverse. Sorry for saying Twitterverse. Our bad.

Guest post by Ali Robbins Hyatt. Ali is a business development manager for Avery Dennison Medical Solutions, a current MITX Up mentor and a past member of the MITX Future Leaders Group. Find her on Twitter!


For the many Bostonites focused on health, I wanted to share some key insights from my days frequenting the now 5 day long health track (2011 was the first year with any health focus) at SXSW in Austin. Although many of the events were in the AT&T Conference Center, a full 2 miles from the main convention area, that didn’t stop the crowds.
 
In “The Future of Digital Health” panel, Rock Health’s Halle Tecco mentioned the recent stat that the average 24 year old will spend more time on Facebook in one week than they will spend with their doctor in twenty years. A military focused health panel noted that we focus on the 100 minutes a year that a person sees his/her doctor and ignore the other 525K minutes when we could focus on prevention for better health.

This is the fifth post in our UX and design blog series. Throughout the month of March we'll be featuring posts from some of Boston's most expert thought leaders, answering these questions: "How do you see the field of UX/design changing in the new technology landscape? What’s most important to know now?” This post is by Scott Kiekbusch, Sr. User Experience Architect at enterprise mobile solutions consultancy, Mobiquit. Scott has over a dozen years of experience as a user experience architect, UI designer, and digital strategist specializing in designing user friendly, forward-thinking technology solutions for some of the world's most well-known brands. Find him on Twitter @adjustafresh.

On January 9, 2007 Steve Jobs unofficially ushered in a new era of personal computing. One day later in an article on CNET, AppForge CEO, Gary Warren, predicted the death of the mobile web browser. Gary was wrong.

This is the fifth post in our UX and design blog series. Throughout the month of March we'll be featuring posts from some of Boston's most expert thought leaders, answering these questions: "How do you see the field of UX/design changing in the new technology landscape? What’s most important to know now?” This post is by Michael Flint, President of Metropolis Creative, a boutique design shop in Boston's South End specializing in branding, marketing, and website design. Metropolis also hosts the annual Extreme Website Makeover event. Michael actively mentors the entrepreneur community through MITX-Up and is a board member with SEMPO Boston.

User experience design requirements change as users' expectations change. The biggest players have the user experience design bar raised pretty high: Apple, Google, and Facebook for example are delivering generally exceptional user experiences across multiple platforms. Here's what users are currently demanding:

Social Integration
Sharing socially and reading others' experiences are critical in our decision-making. And the marketing line is blurring with gamification, photo/video sharing, and community building. Social campaigns help build communities of brand advocates and keep the conversations real.

We follow lots of blogs, and we share the best stuff with you on Twitter EVERY WEEK. Sometimes every day! Here are the highlights from this week. Did you read anything awesome? Tell us in the comments!

“Business networking is a socioeconomic activity by which groups of like-minded businesspeople recognize, create, or act upon business opportunities.” –Wikipedia. Well hello most boring quote in the world! Can’t you just imagine expressionless zombies in suits shaking hands over glasses of bourbon? We've been thinking a lot about networking lately, and we've determined this: networking is about so much more than Meeting People and Shaking Hands. (But no offense to bourbon. It’s delicious.)

Okay. So what is networking? And more importantly: how can we be good at it? Boiled down to its essence, networking is an opportunity to make connections. Here’s the catch: even if you’re incredibly outgoing, entering a room full of strangers is intimidating. At most networking events you’ll find people clumping together with coworkers, or making meaningful eye contact with their smartphones; when what we digitally-savvy, forward-thinking social creatures really want is to make connections. Everyone can get better at networking, and here is the good news – it’s totally possible!

As a curious social monkey and near-professional blog peruser, I have composed for you a list of tips and tricks to make your next networking experience the best ever. Find the ones that work for you, and test them out soon at one of Boston's many networking events! (The third installation of the raved-about 100 Beers Party is on Tuesday 3/20. See you there?)

This is the fourth post in our UX and design blog series. Throughout the month of March we'll be featuring posts from some of Boston's most expert thought leaders, answering these questions: "How do you see the field of UX/design changing in the new technology landscape? What’s most important to know now?” This post is by Dustin DiTommaso, Experience Design Director at Mad*Pow. Dustin has spent nearly a decade chasing the perfect blend of form, function and meaning while designing mobile and social applications, multi-channel experiences, behavior change support systems and customer engagement models. His work has been recognized by Yahoo!, Macworld, MITX, New York Festivals and the Boston Phoenix.

As the speed of technologic advancement increases and we hurtle towards the singularity, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the relationships formed between people and interactive technologies. We're seeing a recent and gradual shift in user experience and interaction design constructs, from Utilitarian (functional, useful, and usable) to Meaningful (aesthetic, engaging, and emotional). This is due, in part, to the rise of pervasive computing and software use as volitional activities, and the consumer trend toward buying products that are perceived to be more pleasurable to use.

 This is the third post in our UX and design blog series. Throughout the month of March we'll be featuring posts from some of Boston's most expert thought leaders, answering these questions: "How do you see the field of UX/design changing in the new technology landscape? What’s most important to know now?” This post is by Patrick Harrington, Senior User Experience Architect at Boston Interactive. Patrick is a passionate UX, Information Architecture, and User Interface practitioner at Boston Interactive. He lives in Davis Square, Somerville, and thinks the size of Android phones is getting a bit silly.

Responsive design has taken the web by storm since Ethan Marcotte's seminal piece on the subject in the May 2010 issue of A List Apart, and later, in his book on the subject. I won't be explaining what responsive web design is (though if you are looking to see it in action, try resizing the home page of the new BostonGlobe.com or check out this handy visual example of responsive design. Instead I'm going to talk about how this new approach can and will change the way that designers, marketers, and developers approach a web project.

Responsive Workflow

A responsive web design project means that the typical waterfall methodology of research, plan, design, develop, and deploy needs to be a bit more flexible. Responsive design means instead of designing for just one or two screen sizes, we design flexible layouts to accommodate every screen width a browser or device could have. And there are a lot:

Yup, you read it right.  We want to build the next generation of MITX.org. And we need your help.

MITX is experiencing new heights of growth and engagement from our community. Our industry and the Boston digital technology scene are looking for more from us, and we want to give it to you. We think the sky is the limit in terms of where we can go together, and we need the right online hub to make it happen.

On Twitter, we shared many cool-diddly articles from the industry's best this week, and it's no surprise the top three are all about networking, social and metrics.  If you didn't see them, check them out now:

Guest post by Joel Hughes, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development, Constant Contact. Joel joined Constant Contact in December 2011 with more than 20 years of executive leadership experience at communications technology and mobile services companies. In his role at Constant Contact, Joel is responsible for driving strategic direction and corporate development initiatives.

This post is part of our UX and design blog series. Throughout the month of March we'll be featuring posts from some of Boston's most expert thought leaders, answering these questions: "How do you see the field of UX/design changing in the new technology landscape? What’s most important to know now?” This post is by Ryan Evans, Director of Experience Design at Corey McPherson Nash. Ryan acts as an advocate for users and their goals. His clients include Visible Measures, Phillips Exeter Academy, Museum of Science Boston, Harvard Business School, and Biogen Idec.

Get to know a MITX member! This month we're featuring Staples.

1. Tell us what’s new at Staples.

We recently announced that we’ll be opening an E-Commerce Innovation Center in Cambridge this spring. The office will house teams responsible for designing and implementing innovative new e-commerce solutions for the millions of business customers who shop Staples websites and stores. We’re adding IT, product management, usability and creative positions as we continue to invest in the multi-channel customer experience across mobile devices, desktops and stores. We’ve said publicly that we’re looking to triple the size of our e-commerce and IT teams for Staples.com in the next three years. Tasked with that, we knew that opening an office in Cambridge, a hub of innovation, with both world-class universities and technology companies, would attract some of the world’s best e-commerce talent with the goal of rapidly bringing breakthrough new ideas to market in emerging online technologies like mobile commerce and social media.

Here are a few of the great articles we shared this week! What did you read that was awesome? Tell us in the comments!

How to Turn Social Feedback into Valuable Business Data
Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Website
7 Companies Who Have Killer Facebook Brand Timelines

This is the first post in our UX and design blog series. Throughout the month of March we'll be featuring posts from some of Boston's most expert thought leaders, answering these questions: "How do you see the field of UX/design changing in the new technology landscape? What’s most important to know now?"