The mapped story format is an interesting way to make longer news stories more reader-friendly.

Devised by the Calgary Herald’s David Hedley—a friend and former colleague—the mapped story format begins with the summary written in a classic inverted pyramid style.

The body of the story is organized into mini chapters, dealing with one news element at a time. The mini-chapters are led by informative subheads, signaling to readers what comes next.

Hedley suggests the mapped story format offers several advantages over the commonly used inverted pyramid, including improved clarity, scannability and comprehensibility.

While this guideline focuses on news, the principles apply to any field of writing. In fact, it works very well on the Web, where well-versed designers frequently utilize anchors, links, subheads and digestible chunks of layered web copy to promote positive online experiences.

Read entire report: Mapped story format helps readers

When a business is growing, it can be hard to keep up with the workload, which can negatively impact service quality.

Vancouver business coach Mark Wardell, founder of Wardell Professional Development, offers four tools in CGA Magazine that can help any business achieve sustained growth.

Business manual
It houses your strategies, your policies, your systems, and any other information you need to run your firm with cognizance. Not only will this manual help smooth out the daily management of your firm, it will also give everyone involved peace of mind that things are being done according to a plan.

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Websites that let users customize the UI have the same measured usability as regular sites, reveals a recent study by Jakob Nielsen. Websites for customizing products, however, score substantially worse due to complex workflow.

Designs are often adapted to individual users so different people see different screens, both in applications and on websites. Nielsen notes there are two main ways to “individualize” the user experience, depending on who initiates the adaptation:

Customization

Customization happens when the user tells the computer what he or she prefers to see.

Personalization

Personalization happens when the computer modifies its behavior to suit its predictions about the current user’s interests.

The study concludes customization is complicated, both technologically and design-wise.

“To get a user from blank slate to fully customized interface or product takes exceptional design skill,” said Nielsen. “It also requires cooperation among multiple groups to assemble, organize, and architect a usable customization path.”

He added: “Customization isn’t something you can throw together in a couple weeks, and businesses who approach it in that manner are risking their reputation and revenues.”

Read Nielsen’s full report: Customization of UIs and products.

Businesses are hard-pressed during this difficult recession. Marketing budgets are being scrutinized more than ever and slashed. Fortunately, there are effective and affordable online tools and technologies to gain a competitive advantage.

To explore new technologies businesses can tap into, Webcopyplus spoke to Robert Bosley, CEO Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based Fusion Corporate Services Inc., which specializes in customized marketing solutions and business profitability.

What is the key to marketing in an economic downturn?

FCS: Not to stop spending on marketing as you not only need to survive but you have a excellent opportunity to increase your market share as more and more companies are searching for ways to improve their business. You need to focus on spending on methods with a higher than average ROI. One of several areas we have achieved success is on cross-media campaign tools for customer acquisition and retention.

Cross media campaigns are those that use multiple media avenues to achieve the multiple touches necessary today to reach the customer or prospect.

Can you give us an example?

FCS: One valuable component of cross media campaigns is highly targeted direct video email messaging.

Please elaborate.

FCS: Let me be clear, we are not talking about static broadcast email blasts. Those can be impersonal and often end up in the spam mailbox. What I am referring to is a patent pending technology that has a proven track record. Clients normally experience view rates from 30% to 62%, compared to the typical response rate of 1% to 3% with a direct mail campaign.

This technology is a self-opening email that will communicate your message with video and sound with a much greater retention and action rate than standard email. Furthermore, and also very important, is the ability to provide you with the analytics to measure the effectiveness of the message and the ability to modify your campaign. You can see who opened, watched, explored, forwarded, and responded to each email communication.

Can you name some industries that have used this technology with success?

FCS: Manufacturing, wholesale, healthcare products, medical equipment, entertainment, gift giving, non-profit organizations, insurance, employee recruitments, newsletters to name a few. Also, banks and credit unions, universities, hospitals, sports teams, and radio or television stations are excellent candidates.

Is this method expensive?

FCS: It really is not, in many ways. For example, it requires no software investment or IT expertise on the client’s end because the program runs from the vendor’s servers. Furthermore, one measure of success is outcomes so mailing list size is not crucial to the success of the program. Also, it costs virtually nothing to send the message out two or three times.

This tool can be an excellent link to websites; it can qualify recipients for direct mail; and it can help salespeople target the most interested prospects. It can help your overall marketing and communication strategies.
To learn more, about cross media campaigns, you can visit Fusion’s website at www.fcs.us.com or contact Robert directly at robertb@fcs.us.com.

It seems people who search on Bing could be more commercial than Google searchers.

According to a study by search-advertising network Chitika, visitors who arrive at sites from organic search results on Bing are 55% more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google.

Chitika looked at the click-through rates from 32 million ad impressions across its network of more than 50,000 websites in a week this past July. Visitors from Bing clicked on an ad 1.5% of the time on average, versus a 0.97% click-through rate for Google visitors, and a 1.24% click-through rate for Yahoo.

Click fraud is a pay per click online advertising crime where a person, automated script or computer program imitates a web browser user clicking on an ad. The purpose? To generate a charge per click without having actual interest in the ad, usually in a bid to use up a competitor’s marketing budget.

The overall industry average click fraud rate in Q2 was 12.7%. That’s down from 13.8% for Q1 2009, and from the 16.2% rate reported for Q2 2008 (source: ClickForensics).

When it comes to writing for the Web, web content writers should take a pointer from journalists: never bury the lead.

Seasoned journalists write no-nonsense copy that gets to the important information at once. On the contrary, inexperienced web content writers expect online visitors to do the hard work and plow through piles of long-winded website content. This web content writer is sending the message: this will take some time — which can turn people away on the fast-paced Web.

A web content writer with experience knows investing extra time to define the key messages, get the lead to the top of the website content, and keep the information clear and concise is advantageous. It sends the message: this won’t take much of your time. And, if the website content is relevant, the visitor will quickly determine what the story is about and why he should read on.

It’s called the inverted pyramid, and it enables businesses to quickly and effectively relay why the visitor should pay attention.

When you only have a few seconds to make a point, every word counts.

Microsoft and Yahoo reached a deal Wednesday to challenge Google’s online search dominance.

Under the 10-year deal, Yahoo.com and Bing.com will maintain their own branding but search results on Yahoo.com will say “powered by Bing.” Yahoo, in turn, will be responsible for attracting premium advertisers, reported CNN.

Microsoft will reportedly pay Yahoo 88% of the revenue it gains from searches on Yahoo’s sites. Microsoft will also have permission to integrate Yahoo’s search technology into its own existing Internet search platforms.

The positive aspect for Yahoo is that it will no longer need to spend millions of dollars developing search technology in an effort to catch up to Google.

Let the Bing vs. Google wars begin!

Read Business Week’s: Yahoo Gives In to Microsoft, Gives Up on Search

Would you like to transform a humble website into a multi-billion-dollar business empire? Here’s an article that covers some of the key ingredients that go into building a hugely successful web business, and separates the online giants from the wannabe websites.

Don’t think it’s possible? Yes, Google’s massive. But, remember, 10 years ago nobody thought anyone could conquer the likes of AltaVista, WebCrawler and Yahoo. And Facebook hasn’t been around that long, arriving on the cyber scene in 2004.

Read Recipe for a billion-dollar website.