It’s one thing to learn about nature in a book. It’s quite another to see mother nature and its amazing creatures up close.

That’s what Webcopyplus helped Canadian tour operator Expore Travel get across with its recently overhauled web content. Through a series of stories, their web content brings to light several outdoor adventures in BC, each designed to connect with and inspire people.

In fact, well delivered stories can entice visitors to become fond of a company and ultimately prompt purchases. That’s because people make decisions emotionally and then rationalize them logically. On and off the Web, stories can be very influential communication tools.

By the way, if you’re looking for some of the best BC travel guides in the business, you should talk to Nick Gudewill or Cory Matheson. You can reach them through their adventure travel website.

More than 113 billion searches were conducted in July 2009, representing a 41% increase versus a year ago, reported comscore.

Google Sites attracted significantly more searches than any other engine with 76.7 billion searches conducted, or 67.5%.

Among the five global regions, Europe accounted for the highest share of searches at 32.1%, followed by Asia Pacific (30.8%) and North America (22.1%).

Google—whose brand is estimated to be worth $100 billion—is the king of search. There’s no arguing that. But can someone take them down?

Time provides an interesting perspective on the search industry, discussing the yet-to-be-approved Microsoft/Yahoo marriage.

Reporter Frahad Manjoo also brings to light an irony: Google and Microsoft share a similar problem. Google derives about 97% of its revenue from advertising, while Microsoft makes the bulk of its money from just two products—Windows and Office. Hence, the reason they’re attempting to diversify with products like Chrome and Google Docs.

Read: Can Microsoft’s Bing, or anyone, seriously challenge Google?

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).