Have you been thinking about trading your car keys for a bike helmet when it comes to your work commute? If you have, now is the perfect time to make the leap.

National Bike to Work Week is May 14 to 18 and here at Adfusion, we’ll be celebrating the Twin Cities-specific Bike Walk Week during the week of June 2. Due to our northern location, it makes sense to have our event a little later in the year when good weather is more of a guarantee.

If you haven’t tried biking or walking to work, these events can provide the perfect impetus to give it a try. And if you are already doing it, it’s a great time to share tips with others who may be thinking about doing the same, as well as share resources with your fellow bikers and walkers.

As part of our celebration, we’ll be providing a healthy breakfast one day and have a biking and walking themed barbecue another. We’ll also be distributing maps and other helpful commuting resources specific to the area around our office. If your office is planning to celebrate one of these events, or recognizes biking and walking in any other way throughout the year, we’d love to hear what you’re doing.

At Adfusion management has made it easy for those who choose to bike by providing bike racks and parking as well as small locker rooms and showers for employees.. Is there anything that your employer does to make it easier for you to commute by bike or foot?

For those who haven’t yet tried commuting by bike, there are a few common barriers that keep most people from giving it a try. The National Bike to Work Week website provides resources to help make your commute easier and I’ll be talking about overcoming some of those obstacles in a subsequent blog post. If you have something that’s holding you back, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to cover that issue in the next post.

The days when companies relied on 30-second TV spots and full-page newspaper ads as their main tools for staying on top are long gone.

What kind of advertising works now? Story formats and engaging content an audience can relate to and connect with. Storytelling plays a huge role when it comes to product representation. It’s a great way to tug on consumers’ emotions and build lasting and trusting relationships with them.

Though advertising techniques have changed, the goal remains the same: selling products and continually bringing in profits. It’s just a little tricky to stay ahead of the game, be relevant and adapt to consumers’ changing online behavior.  For one thing, social media has altered the playing field. People like a sense of connection and forming a relationship with a brand. Here are some examples of big brands using engaging, story-like formats to advertise their products:

• Coca Cola: They have come up with a plan completely based around storytelling. This video shows us how they’ve evolved from their earlier techniques to this new form of pull — rather than push — advertising.

• Parks in and around Kissimmee Florida: Kissimmee uses a few different types of tools to engage with this ad layout. As you can see here, they provide the reader with a video, a short story about the product, a photo gallery, special offers, and they give readers the opportunity to connect with social media.

What are your favorite ways a brand has shared a story?

As we creep into 2012, a proliferation of publishers will attempt to monetize their content by erecting paywalls. Most recently, the Los Angeles Times and Gannett have announced plans to begin charging readers for online news, and even Groupon is getting into the paywall game, with a “VIP” program that could by all standards be considered a paywall for premium content.

Paywalls have been around for quite awhile. The Wall Street Journal was one of the first major newspapers to implement a hard paywall, essentially not allowing any digital access unless you’re a subscriber, back in 1997. More recent paywall successes have come in the form of soft paywalls, or metered paywalls—often porous by design—allowing a reader to view a number of stories before hitting the paywall. The New York Times implemented this type of paywall, allowing 20 articles per month for free, with some perceived success in March of 2011. Since then, a number of large dailies have followed suit or announced plans for a similar paywall, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

When a visitor is allowed to browse a number of stories before hitting the metered paywall the casual reader is not typically affected. The thought behind the metered paywall is that the regular user, who hits the paywall on a regular basis, will eventually feel obligated to pay for the content, and won’t be turned off by a poor user experience. There’s also the thought that the porous nature of the soft paywall will potentially “guilt” regular users who bypass the paywall into paying.

There are also a few counter strategies to paywalls, including Google’s “First Click Free” option and the tactic of bringing “breaking” news out from behind the paywall. First Click Free allows a user coming from a Google web search to view the full text of the document without registering or subscribing to the source’s site. According to Google, this allows a “discovery opportunity” for a casual browser and promotion for the publisher, while also allowing the search engine an opportunity to crawl the page.

The other counter strategy involves providing breaking news, or news publishers believe is best suited for everyone, free to all readers. This adds a dangerous ethical element into the paywall equation, since it grays the line between revenue generation and editorial, and subsequent questions arise. How does the publisher determine what content should be free and available to all? What content should be behind the wall? How does this affect the quality of the reader’s experience? Are we dividing content between two groups of readers, those that can afford to pay and those that can’t?

From a publisher’s perspective, it’s hard to argue against paywalls. They’re still generating quality content for their readers at a significant cost; yet the revenue gained from online ad sales isn’t coming close to the amount of revenue lost from declining subscriptions.

From a reader’s perspective, online news has almost always been free, so why should they start paying now? If a reader can just move on to a free site and get the same or similar content, why would they consider pulling out their wallet now?

It’s also interesting to consider the effect publishers pulling their content behind paywalls will have on content aggregators. As a publisher with a paywall, how open are you going to be to giving your valuable content to aggregators like Pulse, Flipboard, and Taptu for free? I think not. Even publishers that have their content out there for free aren’t too happy about aggregators scraping their content for the aggregator’s own use.

Just ask Barry Collins of PC Pro what he thinks of Zite, the news app, presenting his publication’s content in their own application Barry’s argument is that PC Pro provides the content on their site for free in exchange for the opportunity to expose their readers to advertising. Zite eliminates the advertising, thereby eliminating that content for advertising exchange, along with the revenue that accompanies it. Even the Wall Street Journal stopped playing in the sandbox with the mighty Google by limiting the articles that are available via the First Click Free program.

Are there too many paywalls? Probably not yet, but where is the saturation point? As more and more news and information sites move to paywalls, could there be a point when all news sites have some sort of paywall? The answer is: not likely.

Hypothetically, if all news sites moved to paywalls simultaneously, there would be a significant market opportunity for a single site to take advantage of the situation and be the one free news source. Assuming publishers with paywalls are only able to convert 30 to 50 percent of their audience to subscribers, which based on released figures would be on the extreme high end, there would literally be millions of unique users searching for a free news source. Think of the value of that audience and those banner ads … move over Facebook IPO.

There is a big difference between data and information. Data is having a huge library full of books you haven’t read, whereas information is having the Cliff Notes. Data doesn’t mean a lot without analysis, and one thing that companies have is a lot of data.

In online advertising “Big Data” is the buzzword du jour. Big Data describes the ability to apply algorithms to churn through huge repositories of data to find valuable information that can truly change your business. In display advertising, Big Data is a big part of how advertisers choose which ads to show to which people.

A timely example of how Big Data works is the way Target figured out how a teen girl was pregnant before her father did. Using consumer purchase information, Target statisticians were able to determine buying patterns associated with pregnant women and began sending coupon books for baby clothes and diapers.

Commercial vendors such as IBM Netezza and Teradata have been providing data-mining and business intelligence systems for years. But while extremely powerful, these systems can be cost prohibitive for small companies and startups. Thankfully there’s Hadoop.

Inspired by Google’s MapReduce framework, Hadoop provides an entry-level solution to the world of big data. Originally developed as a support system for an open source search engine, Hadoop has grown to a software framework to run distributed applications across clusters of commodity server hardware. In other words, it can take “cheap” computers and tie them together to store and analyze datasets that would otherwise be too large or too unstructured for a relational database.

Hadoop does this by breaking up big programming tasks into smaller discreet jobs that can be spread out among several computers called “mapping” and then consolidating all of the various computer results into a single result set called “reducing.”

Amazon took Hadoop a step farther with their cloud computing services and began providing Hadoop’s MapReduce framework as a “rentable” service. Rather than buying racks full of servers, companies can “rent” processing time for as little as $0.015 per hour. So depending on your needs, it’s possible to have a 1000 node Hadoop cluster available for $15/hour. When it’s not needed, you can turn it off and it doesn’t cost anything.

With so much processing power available for so little money, any size organization can take advantage of software designed to find the proverbial “needle in the haystack.”

What’s better … a straightforward, hit-em-over-the-head headline … or something alluring, catchy and clever? In limited online space, it can be hard to do both functions justice in one phrase. What’s the solution?

Fortunately, online media provides the opportunity to test and see what’s pulling the most clicks, attracting the people you want, and providing solid leads or profitable conversions for your business. It’s good to try both approaches.

But where would you put your money: Smacking them with the facts and no frills … or catching their curiosity and teasing their perceptions? Here’s my take, with a caveat.

The Take

Hitting them over the head works better in online media, and in most situations. You have only a miniscule moment to capture attention, and such a limited budget to do the marketing job, that there’s no time or money to waste. The straightforward message tells it like it is, vettes out the casual browsers, and narrows your audience down to the people that really care about what you’re offering.

Here’s an example. Which one of these headlines worked better for a product marketer:

A. Fix dark circles, bags and wrinkles around your eyes

B. Youthful beauty is in the eyes of … you!

Headline A hammered B, by about a 2 to 1 margin in profitability. They both pulled clicks, but A converted at double the rate, because it attracted people who wanted to fix dark circles, bags and wrinkles around their eyes. B attracted curiosity but didn’t generate the sales; it was less direct, and pulled a different kind of person in.

The Caveat

There’s always a caveat. You know it already: For some products, and in some situations, the teaser/catchy/clever headline can do the job better. Examples? Situations? That’s going to be the topic of my next blog post.

The Close

Headlines matter. They can be your hero, or your heel. Fortunately, testing can tell you which creative approach is going to assume which role. Effective platforms such as Adfusion’s direct response and new Panoramic formats, along with intense optimization processes, help you figure out what’s best.

So brainstorm and write away, approach your message from different angles … and don’t forget that sometimes the biggest heroes are the hardworking, no-frills ones that just get the job done.

Prior to the Kindle Fire, Apple’s iOS system was dominating the tablet market. Depending on whose stats you were looking at, Apple constitutes 65 to 75 percent of the market. The good news for advertisers and app developers is the lack of fragmentation in the market made deciding where to place your tablet-designated spend easy – one screen size to worry about, one operating system to worry about, one app to worry about.

Then Christmas came. Although Amazon’s only claim regarding Kindle Fire sales is they’ve sold more than 1 million units over the holidays, according to Barclay’s analyst Anthony DiClemente, the Kindle Fire’s holiday sales were well above that, claiming to be roughly 5.5 million units. Apple on the other hand is still selling a large number of iPads, and we should know more when Apple reveals its holiday quarter earnings – scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 24. Estimates put Apple’s iPad holiday sales at anywhere from a little less than 12 million to 19 million, depending on whose reports you’re looking at. Most think roughly 13 million to 14 million.

With that type of disruption in the marketplace, advertisers may start asking questions related to how many different tablet advertising options they are going to support. Since the Kindle Fire runs a heavily modified version of Android, do we need an app for both Apple and Android? With Kindle Fire’s 7-inch screen size versus the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen, how many different ad sizes are we going to need to develop? If iPad users are willing to pay $500 for a tablet, and Kindle Fire users only pay $200, are iPad users a more valuable audience, and how do we determine what we should pay? A recent post on Search Engine Roundtable found that Google AdSense ads weren’t populating on Kindle Fires, so are our current advertising initiatives reaching all the available platforms?

Throw into the equation the speculation that Google will be releasing their own tablet device in March or April, and the waters are muddied even further.

It’s also interesting to note that the entirely opposite effect could result.. If the Kindle Fire’s sales are as high as the estimated 5.5 million units, that would give the Kindle Fire roughly 50 percent of the non-iPad tablet market share. If this trend continues, and tablet owners fall into only two buckets, those that can pay $500 for an iPad, or those that can pay $200 for a Kindle Fire, suddenly advertisers are only concerned with two individual devices.

As time goes on, we will see how the tablet market will shake out, but at this point, if you’re an advertiser looking to get your message out on a tablet and your primary concern is reach, your focus should be on iPads, meanwhile keeping a close eye on the Kindle Fire.

In just 50 days Wikipedia’s parent company Wikimedia raised $16 million in donations from more than 500,000 people. Compared with $8.6 million in 2009, the 2010 campaign showed an amazing improvement in performance and scale. Wikimedia was kind enough to make a good deal of their campaign strategy and testing results public. Online advertisers should pay attention. The nitty-gritty details of the testing methodology are presented here.

Banner Testing Highlights

• Graphic banners outperformed text-only banners by 50 percent.
• The “personal appeal” from Jimmy performed the best overall in both 2009 and 2010.
• While having a specific call to action on the ad increased the overall effectiveness, putting a “Donate Now” button on the banner actually decreased click-through rates. Rather a “Read Now” button performed much better.
• Switching from the “Jimmy” ads to banners featuring Wikipedia editors reinvigorated the declining CTR over time; however the donation amounts also declined accordingly.
• In the final days of the campaign, the highest CTR banner was discovered, which introduced the concept of “limited time/urgency.” The banner featured the text: “Only 4 days left in 2010 to make a tax-deductible contribution to keep Wikipedia free. Please help Wikipedia pay its bills in 2011.”
• Progress meters featured on the banners became more effective as the amounts raised grew closer to the “goal” amount.

Landing Page Highlights

• Minimizing checkboxes and links is effective.
• Moving the “appeal” text higher in the form increased the overall donation rates and amounts.
• Including a “goal progress meter” after reaching the halfway mark increased rates and amounts.
• Having seven radio-button options for donation amounts proved better than having just four.
• Having a “where your donation goes” text box also increased donation rates and amounts.

Most of these results seem “typical” for online banner campaigns, but the provided testing methodology and effectiveness of the campaigns is definitely worthy of study.

The landing page information did have one interesting highlight. In my experience having MORE options tends to lower the performance of a landing page, but in this case it actually increased it. This may have more to do with the specific amounts offered on each radio button being a better fit for potential donors, but intriguing nonetheless. It will be very interesting to see what Wikimedia does in 2012.

I think you should read this blog.

You should read this blog.

This blog is available to read.

One message, three ways to say it. When it comes to creating content marketing communications, your message’s point of view (POV) is critical. Marketers often don’t think about POV consciously, but you sure know it when the POV isn’t working.

Maybe this discussion can put some “why” behind that feeling you get when something’s right on target … or maybe a little off.

I think you should read this blog.

That’s first-person POV. You need to think about when – and if – this POV works. Who is the writer? Is that person an expert or reliable resource trusted for his or her knowledge and opinion? First-person POV works best for storytelling, when the writer is identified. Otherwise, who is the “I?” If you have a good “I” to do the telling, first person can be effective. It can also be the POV to use when you have a known, credible spokesperson.

You should read this blog.

That’s second-person POV. Here, the author might be identified … or not. As with Adfusion’s direct response and Panoramic products, the expertise with second-person POV is implied due to the presentation’s authoritative tone and approach. In second person, the “you” is important because it involves the reader, invites participation, makes them a part of the story, and orders action. This is the most direct of the three POVs. Note that you can make second-person POV even more direct by cutting our example down to three words: Read this blog.

This blog is available to read.

That’s third-person POV. This is the newsy angle. Here, the writer acts as reporter, without opinions (because they can’t say “I”). Third-person POV cannot directly instruct the reader to think or do anything, because the word “you” isn’t used. Third person lets the reader make his or her own judgments. Used right, this POV can be powerful in content marketing. But is third person best? If you’re striving for a very newsy angle, the answer can be yes. In other cases, the answer is no. After all, the ultimate intent of content marketing is to incite some action, and when you can’t make a direct instruction or request, you lose a level of control.

So which POV is best?

As you can see, no one POV works in all situations. And to be honest, it’s marketing: Sometimes people mix their POVs. I do. But can you tell which one this writer relies upon most because it’s right for the most situations?

Well, back in college I was a bartender at a local bar and grill. For three years, I spent three to four nights a week making drinks, backing up the servers, and most importantly providing quality service to my customers. In looking back at the crazy world of bartending, I often find myself lightheartedly comparing my current career as an account manger to my bartending days.

The Bar is Open

It’s the calm before the storm. I would stock my bar with the essentials for the night, such as fresh-cut limes, glasses, drinks mixes and bottled beers. In addition to stocking the bar, I would assist the servers with their set up and make their needed drinks. As a result of working closely with the servers, I began to notice that they trusted that I would make their tables’ drinks on time.

In account management, it’s imperative that your “bar is fully stocked.” Whether this is prioritizing your pending projects and meetings, providing fluid communications or pulling reports, it’s crucial to be prepared to manage obstacles with a positive attitude and well-learned proficiencies.

Similar to the bartender and service staff, it’s essential for the sales and account management teams to have a trusting relationship. The sales team is often in the field selling, and they need to rely on account management to “make their drinks.” This could entail preparing proposals, implementing campaigns or answering client inquires … all with the goal of making sure the client gets seamless service and the right mix behind the scenes to deliver a successful campaign.

Dinner Rush

When it rains, it pours. At dinnertime, my servers would all be placing orders at the same time, there was a full bar of customers and usually a lady at the end who needed her tab ASAP or she would be late for the movie.

In dealing with the “dinner rush” in account management, it’s most important to be able to prioritize efficiently, and provide communication quickly. The account manager often finds their inbox overflowing with both internal and external emails, while juggling multiple projects and campaigns.It’s like making seven drinks at once!

All of this correspondence is important, and it all deserves attention. The client should never know about the chaos, but always be made to feel like they are the only customer at the bar.

It’s up to the account manager to manage the pending items and allow the sales team to deliver on all of the orders taken from their clients.

Closing Time

The door is locked and the restaurant is empty; it’s just me and the servers. After the nonstop crazy night, we tally up the sales and count our tips. The night was a success. We delivered a great night out to our patrons. Our investment was well worth the time, because they are likely to come back for more.

Similarly, when the “door is locked” on a campaign, it’s rewarding to an account manager who was able to partner with the sales team to develop and deliver an effective campaign for their client.

Like a bartender, a good account manager works both in front of the scenes, as well as behind them, to make a campaign work and assure that the client gets the service and results he or she needs.

Is your order arriving on time and is it what you wanted?

What is NFC?  The National Football Conference aside, NFC stands for near-field communications and the technology utilizing a chip that initiates a data transfer via radio when the chip gets within range of another sensor, typically a range of 4 centimeters or less.  NFC-enabled devices can read any MIME data, they need no batteries, they’re rewritable, and allow peer-to-peer sharing.  QR codes on the other hand are 2-D barcodes that, when scanned by a mobile device, can be developed to send a text message or an email, place a phone call, or drive people to a website.

At first glance, it would appear that the ability to simply tap your mobile device against something using NFC would have the obvious advantage versus opening a QR code application, scanning a code (assuming you have enough light), and then opening that scanned code with the correct application.  But if we dig a little deeper, there are definitely some limitations of NFC from a marketing standpoint that will allow QR codes to continue to thrive.

From a cost perspective, NFC requires a chip, QR codes do not.  Let’s assume your client insists on using a QR code or NFC technology in their next full-page ad in Vogue magazine to drive potential consumers using mobile devices to a page where they can purchase the new winter fashions.  NFC stickers aren’t extremely expensive at 82 cents per sticker buying in increments of 1,000, but your Vogue circulation is approximately 1.2 million, translating into a cost for your client at just under a million dollars to place an NFC sticker on all of their ads.  Of course, that doesn’t take into consideration the additional production cost that Vogue is going to charge to place the stickers on all of the pages.  Since a QR code is free to produce and print, there’s no overhead, and therefore the NFC tags would almost need to be infinitely more engaging to be worthwhile.

From a proximity standpoint, as stated earlier, an NFC chip would typically need to be within a range of 4 centimeters or less.  In my previous blog post I had mentioned a couple of different uses of QR codes, including on the backs of semis, and on a billboard to alert nearby restaurant goers of a competing restaurant’s happy hour deal.  Now if those examples were to use NFC instead of QR codes, I guess I’d have to get out of my car in the middle of traffic and try to get within 4 centimeters of the semi and we’d see people scaling billboards to get within range.

The third and final barrier to entry in the United States at this point is the limited number of devices utilizing NFC technology.  Apple’s iOS is a close second in terms of mobile operating systems in the U.S., behind Android, and although many thought the new iOS 5 operating system would feature NFC, as of now, none of its mobile devices actually utilize this technology. This means you’re automatically excluding approximately 27.3 percent of U.S. smartphone users (according to comScore’s recent survey of 30,000 smartphone users) when utilizing NFC.

QR codes require no chip, and therefore aren’t limited by distance to initiate a data transfer nor by the cost associated with purchasing the chip. At this point almost all smartphones have the capability to read the four main types of 2-D barcodes, so there’s little opportunity to leave potential consumers behind.

At the end of the day, when deciding between NFC and QR codes for either your company or your client, it’s important to understand your client’s campaign’s goals and KPIs and how NFC or QR codes would fit into a strategy that makes the most sense.