hilgo

The New York City based company, Solve Media is one of those super savvy powerhouses that operates as an innovative oasis in the land of digital advertising. Solve Media focuses on delivering advertisers and publishers smarter ways to increase user engagement and user experience on the web and is best known for its genius Type-In CAPTCHA technology, which replaces obnoxious and confusing CAPTCHAs with relevant brand messaging.

In July, Solve Media served 18 million type-ins across 2,000 publishers, according to Ari Jacoby, the CEO and Co-Founder of Solve Media. Solve Media’s CAPTCHA ad clients include Gilt Group, Toyota, Dr. Pepper, Microsoft, Expedia, Chase, General Electric and Groupon.

Take a look at an example CAPTCHA ad for Invisalign here:

Today, Solve Media released a study on the effectiveness of its TYPE-INs that was conducted by Young-Bean Song, founder and principal of AnalyticsDNA, a Seattle-based strategy and analytics consultancy. Song took a look at campaigns executed for more than 40 brands by Solve Media across several categories over one year.

“These results are remarkable,” said Song. “I have never seen campaign brand impact results this consistently strong in my 14 years of digital marketing. Looks like Solve Media has found that unique sweet spot of ‘voluntary indirect engagement’ that actually works.”

The results are in– on average, campaigns generated 65% for Association, 67% for ad Recall, 38% for Favorability, and 24% for Intent.

The type-in ads also produced significant results by industry, with consumer product goods (CPGs) companies killing it at a 146% in brand awareness. Other categories include: Entertainment and Media, 73%; Auto, 54%; Finance, 50%; Technology, 44%; Recall, 35%, and Travel, 22%.

Approximately 2% of your customers will rip you off. They will game your system. They will do everything to gain financial win from your pockets. They will lie to you. Cheat on you. Pretend they’re angry. Neglect you. Won’t pay. Complain about you out in the open, just to put you under pressure. They will demand to speak to your boss. Will yell at you and ask you if you know who they are. Well, you get the idea.

I was reminded by this last week when I tried to buy at ticket at the Gent train station. I went to the NMBS ticket machine, selected a train ticket to Brussels and paid by bank card. However, the machine failed to print en went out of order. I had no choice but going to the ticket counter. The service employee there said he couldn’t help me, couldn’t give me my money back and handed me a standard contact form to send to the NMBS headquarters to complain.

The employee was able to see the out-of-order message on the machine from his counter (that would at least strengthen my case), I was wearing a suit (I guess that would make me a more trustworthy person in some people’s minds) and over the last year, I bought tickets with him at least 15 more times (he could have recognized me, there aren’t so many Dutch people buying tickets to Amsterdam every week at 6h00 in the morning). But that all wasn’t enough for him.

But really, why would I lie to him?

And then I thought about the 2% rule. The 2% of the customers that probably tried to rip the NMBS off and why this employee was not allowed to give me my money back.

It’s not about this 2%. It is about what you do with the other 98%. Too many companies let the 2% of their customer dictate how they service the majority of their customers.
And treating all your customers like possible cheats won’t bring the 2% down; it will actually stimulate the 98% to look for compensation and ways to cheat the system as well.

And it doesn’t have to be this way.

• Zappos has a 365-day return policy for their shoes. Tony Hsieh, their CEO, admits in his book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (if you haven’t read it yet – read it) that 2% of their customers will send in their shoes after a year. So that they had a full year of free shoes. They will try to game the system. However, the remaining 98% of Zappos’ customers are so happy with their return policy (and are nudged into buying more) that they make up for it.
• At my favorite bar in Gent, Cafe Rene, approximately 2% of the people on their terrace doesn’t pay or doesn’t pay enough. It would make sense to let people pay every time they get their food and drinks. However, keeping an account of the table and paying when you leave is such a more convenient way of spending your time on a terrace. And I bet that paying later nudges people in spending more then when you confront them with the bill when they order another round.
• Many insurance companies (e.g. Interpolis) fix your damage first and arrange the details later. I guess at least 2% of their customers tries to rip them off. But that in no way adds up to the great satisfaction you feel as a customers when things are handled quick and without hassle.

The cheating and lying 2% of your customers are your most important customers. They help to make the difference between companies that act from fear of losing some money on 2% of their customers and the companies that see an opportunity to make a decent profit from the rest of them.

Door Daniela Gilsanz

Title: World Payments Report 2011
Type: Analysis
Author: Capgemini
Opt-In: Yes
Short:

Now in its seventh year, the World Payments Report (WPR) from Capgemini, The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and Efma looks at how the global payments landscape is responding to shifts in economic and competitive conditions, advances in technology, increased regulatory pressure, and evolving customer demands.

Payments have weathered the economic crisis well: the volume of non-cash payments globally continued to grow in 2009, albeit at a more modest pace than in recent years. Initial data suggests the growth in volumes picked up again in 2010, but several external and internal factors are driving banks and forcing transformation in the industry.

The World Payments Report 2011 looks first at the global and regional trends in payments volumes; then outlines the potential effects of various regulations and industry initiatives on payments; before exploring how those trends are driving industry transformation.

Download: Report
Date: Q3 2011

CNNArabic - Even the “Play” button has direction from right to left.

/via nikolay

Acts not ads: Coca Cola helps Red Cross by adding charity donation to vending machine (by CScoutJapan)

Written by happyplace

We’ve been using Google Plus all week and we can already foresee wasting a huge portion of our lives on it until we’re forcibly herded into the next social networking breakthrough. The one stumble we had was dividing our friends up into Google Plus’s suggested "circles" of family, friends, and coworkers. We believe life isn’t lived by drawing such lines in the sand, so we came up with our own set of 21 suggested circles for dividing up your friends on Google Plus. We’ll continue adding to this list, so tell us in the comments which ones we missed.

Bonus:This kid had lost his dad in the crowd, and freaked out until he saw the Flash and Wonder Woman. He went up to the Flash to ask for help, because he knows him

Summer is here, and there’s a good chance some of you are thinking of picking up something to document your vacations with. iPhones and point-and-shoots are all well and good, but if you want to take it to the pool or the beach, it’s nice to feel sure that an errant splash isn’t going to disable your camera permanently. We’ve got a few water-hardened Flip-esque pocket cams here for you to choose from, but which deserves your hard-earned cash?

I’m not including image samples because to be honest, all these cameras have tiny sensors and small, weak lenses, which combine to produce noisy images with poor sharpness and so on. But they’re cheap and vacation-proof (i.e. immune to trips in shallow water, sand and dirt, and short drops). You can’t have everything.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Kodak Playsport – $160

Pros:

• Nice hand-feel
• Wide angle lens
• Extra video options

Cons:

• Sluggish menu
• Small LCD screen
• Easy to accidentally open port doors

I liked the old Playsport, and the new one seems to be an incremental improvement. It’s more compact, and has an ostensibly ergonomic layout — for right-handers, at least. There’s less of a plastic-y feel than the other devices and personally I think it looks the best. It’s much heavier than Samsung’s similarly sized BW10, but the shape is better.

There are several extra video options: in addition to 1080p/30, there’s 720p at 30 and 60 fps, and a WVGA (640×360) mode for more manageable file sizes and SD playback. Navigating the menu is an exercise in patience, however; the d-pad is stiff and moving between selections is slow. The LCD, while small, is easily the sharpest of the cameras.

I found it was a bit too easy to open up the areas where the device’s ports are. A simple slip of the hand (or a could pop open your SD door and in goes the sand. The other cameras have significantly more security in this area.

Samsung W200 – $160

Pros:

• Image stabilization
• Spring-loaded port doors feel secure
• Biggest LCD of the bunch
• Multi-take, single-file recording

Cons:

• Somewhat large
• Ugly, if I’m honest
• Only two video modes
• Built-in USB plug questionably convenient

The W200 is easily the biggest of these devices. It’s still fairly small, of course, but it feels more bulky. It also feels nice and solid, and that feeling extends to its port doors, which are too easily opened on the Playsport and too fiddly on the BW10. The W200′s doors are spring-loaded and open only with effort — but the good kind of effort. They open when you want them to.

The screen is the biggest of the lineup here, not by much, but it’s worth mentioning. The extra space is used to display info in black bands above and below the picture. The menus are attractive and quick to navigate. The d-pad feels stiff but actually responds very well. Unfortunately the middle button is very deep, as it is used in photo mode to set focus, and you have to press it in quite a ways to make a selection. Not a truly substantial issue, but it bothered me. There’s a flip-out USB plug at the bottom, which is handy if it works for your setup, and a pain if you’d just rather have a port to plug a cable into.

There are only two video modes, 1080p/30 and 720p/30, which is too bad. It has the admirable ability to “pause” the recording without creating a new file, which will be welcomed by many who don’t feel like editing after the fact. It felt better taking still pictures than the others, the camera-shaped Easyshare Sport included.

Also it just about gave me a heart attack suddenly making a droplet noise for its auto-off procedure. You can turn that off.

Toshiba Camileo BW10 – $130

Pros:

• Compact
• Nice clicky controls
• Straightforward to use

Cons:

• What’s with the field of view?
• Extremely slow aperture response
• Must use fingernail to open port door

The BW10 is the simplest to operate of these devices, all of which are pretty simple to operate. But the BW10 is ready to take a picture or video at any moment, and you can take pictures while you’re taking video. The LCD has two modes, one showing just what you record and one showing the whole picture with guidelines showing what the camera will actually record.

Wait, what?

Yes, apparently Toshiba felt that instead of recording everything it can see through the wide-angle lens, the BW10 should cut off the edges and only record the middle. Anything outside the boundary of the box won’t be recorded – even though it’s there. What the hell? I’m pretty sure I’m not mistaken about this, and it’s just a really dumb limitation.

The BW10 also takes a long time to recover from lighting changes. Going from outdoors to indoors, the shot will be dark for several seconds while the camera ratches open the aperture. It takes a long time and actually also affects the cast of the image, going from warm to cool as the aperture opens.

The port doors are very secure — too secure, I might say, since the tiny switch you need to hit can’t be done easily with a finger. Not a big deal really, but it’s annoying that opening the door should be a precision action.

Kodak Easyshare Sport – $80

Pros:

• Shaped like a camera, if you like that

Cons:

• Always starts up in still shot mode
• No video options
• Poorly placed USB port

The Easyshare Sport is more of a budget point and shoot that happens to be waterproof, but it seems to fit in with these guys more than other point and shoots. The trouble is it’s just not very good. There’s a big grip in which fit the AA batteries that power it, but the shutter button isn’t on top of it, where you’d expect it to be. The control layout is a bit arbitrary overall. Why aren’t the zoom buttons mapped to the D-pad, for instance? Why is the D-pad so small, and the center button so hard to hit, that I end up hitting every direction at once when I try to select a menu option? Why isn’t video next to “auto” in the mode select? The whole thing gives an impression of being thrown together with no design at all.

The quality isn’t impressive, either. It looks like it has a real lens but it’s more or less a pinhole, like the rest of these cameras (which also go to some length to make it look like they have real, round lenses), and its slowness shows in the choppiness of the image on the LCD. Even in a well-lit room the image was dim and jumpy. There is only one video mode (two if you count underwater, but I don’t) and I don’t trust it.

To get at the USB port you have to open the bottom panel where the batteries and SD card go, and it’s a pain in the first place. No grip and having to press in two directions at once means if your hands are wet, forget about it. Not really user-friendly.

Our pick

The Toshiba makes too many compromises, and I wouldn’t pay a dollar for the Easyshare Sport. So it’s between the W200 and the Playsport. Here’s how it breaks down in my opinion:

Playsport

• Sharper, more accurate LCD
• More video modes (60fps can be used as slow-mo)
• Wider lens

W200

• Bigger LCD
• Superior video quality (though it’s still not that good)
• Handy features like image stabiliztion and record-pause

I can’t tell you which is the best choice for you. If I absolutely had to choose, I’d go with the W200 simply because the end product is better — none of these cameras produces good images, but the Playsport was significantly less sharp in images and video. They have the same MSRP, so think hard about what part of the camera is important to you and make a choice based on that.

Met de onstuimige groei van Facebook in ons land krijgt dit kanaal bij steeds meer bedrijven een prominentere plek in de marketingmix. Gelukkig zijn er vele tools die je kunnen helpen bij het succesvol inzetten van Facebook marketing. Vele van deze zijn ook nog eens gratis. Hier de zeven beste, gratis Facebook marketing tools op een rij. Uitgebreid gebruikt en getest door ondergetekende en onmisbaar voor iedere beheerder van een fanpagina.

1. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is het standaard statistieken pakket van Facebook zelf. Het biedt een overzicht van de gebruikers en van de interacties die plaatsvinden op je Facebook fanpagina. Zo geeft het inzage in het aantal (actieve) gebruikers, likes, paginaweergaves en de demografische data van je gebruikers. Je vindt de statistieken per pagina onder de knop ‘statistieken bekijken’ en van al je fanpagina’s op Facebook.com/insights. Lees ook deze twee handige artikelen voor meer uitleg over Facebook Insights.

Heb je de Facebook Like & Share button ook op je website geïntegreerd? Vergeet dan ook niet om Insights for domains te installeren. Hiermee krijg je door het toevoegen van een enkele regel HTML code inzage in de Facebook interacties die plaatsvinden op jouw eigen domein.

2. Wildfire Social Media Monitor

Als je snel inzage wilt in de groei van het aantal fans is de Wildfire Social Media Monitor een hele handige tool. Hiermee krijg je meteen inzage in de groei van je Facebook fans (en Twitter volgers) en kan je dit vergelijken met twee andere pagina’s naar keuze. Zo krijg je een goed overzicht hoe je het in fangroei doet ten opzichte van je concurrenten. Zo zie je hieronder de groei van de drie grootste Nederlandse merken op Facebook. Let op: niet alle pagina’s worden getrackt door de Wildfire tool. Naast deze tool heeft Wildfire hele gave apps om Facebook wedstrijden te organiseren.

3. AllFacebookStats

Misschien ken je AllFacebook.com al als één van de meest vooraanstaande Facebook Marketing blogs. Maar wist je ook dat ze een Facebook analytics tool aanbieden? Met de gratis variant kun je van drie verschillende Facebook pagina’s de statistieken bijhouden. Het is niet de meest uitgebreide analysetool die er is, maar als je beheerder van 1 tot 3 pagina’s bent geeft dit je een goed overzicht. Uiteraard bieden ze ook betaalde pakketten aan met meer mogelijkheden.

4. Export.ly

Export.ly geeft met een Excel export een volledig overzicht van je Facebook performance. Niet alleen geeft het inzicht in de activiteit op je pagina, maar ook inzage in de prestaties per type update (tekst, link, foto, video), welke posts de meeste likes & reacties ontvangen en een overzicht van je meest actieve Facebook fans, jouw ambassadeurs! Export.ly omschrijft hun product zelf als “awesome social media reports in Excel” en ik ben het helemaal met ze eens. Deze tool geeft je data waar je meteen mee aan de slag kunt.

5. EdgeRankchecker

Hopelijk ben je als beheerder van een Facebook pagina bekend met het fenomeen EdgeRank. Niet? Lees dan eerst dit artikel voordat je ooit nog een update op Facebook plaatst (serieus). EdgeRank is het algoritme waarmee Facebook bepaalt of een update aangemerkt wordt als belangrijk nieuws of niet. De EdgeRank score van een post verschilt per gebruiker, maar de EdgeRankchecker is een tool die over het geheel genomen inzage geeft in de EdgeRank van jouw pagina en vertelt je meteen hoe goed je het doet (slecht, matig, gemiddeld, goed of excellent). Ik check zelf regelmatig de score van mijn pagina’s en ik kan je vertellen: hoog scoren is nog knap lastig.

6. AdSage

Adverteren op Facebook kan heel effectief zijn, mits je het voor het juiste doel toepast, maar is daarnaast ook heel arbeidsintensief. Een voorwaarde voor succesvol adverteren op Facebook is het constant vers houden van advertentie,s om zo de CTR hoog en de CPC laag te houden. De advertentie interface van Facebook helpt daar niet echt bij. Alhoewel het de laatste tijd flink verbetert is, kost het vaak nog veel tijd om de advertenties te optimaliseren. Gelukkig is er een oplossing om dat te vergemakkelijken: adSage. Deze gratis tool is het best te omschrijven als de AdWords Editor voor Facebook advertenties. Met zowel adSage als Editor heb je offline toegang tot je advertentiecampagnes, kan je gemakkelijk campagnes bewerken, in bulk nieuwe advertenties importeren uit Excel en die vervolgens weer uploaden naar je campagnes. AdSage bespaart je tijd en vergroot je overzicht van de prestaties. Facebook heeft zelf recent de Power Editor gelanceerd, maar diens mogelijkheden zijn veel beperkter dan die van adSage. Een aanrader als je effectief wilt adverteren op Facebook.

7. HootSuite

Deze tool is bij velen wel bekend. HootSuite is, net als TweetDeck, een social media dashboard waar je gemakkelijk meerdere social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) beheert. Het grote voordeel van HootSuite is dat je ook Facebook updates kunt plannen. Hiermee kan je voorkomen dat je in je vakantie geen updates plaatst (wel blijven monitoren) of fanpagina’s in andere tijdzones beheert. Met HootSuite kan je ook hele gelikte social media rapporten maken, maar helaas valt dat buiten de gratis versie.

Welke Facebook tools gebruik jij?

Bovenstaande tools hebben allemaal gemeen dat ze gratis zijn. Uiteraard zijn er ook vele betaalde tools en applicaties om je Facebook marketing activiteiten te ondersteunen en te verbeteren. Vele van deze betaalde varianten bieden uitgebreidere mogelijkheden dan de gratis varianten. Maar de hierboven beschreven tools kunnen al velen van ons een aardig eind op weg te helpen. Ik ben benieuwd wat jullie ervaringen zijn met de verschillende Facebook tools.

Dit artikel verscheen ook op Marketingfacts.

Our Transparency Report discloses the information that governments have asked for over the past six months. For our latest batch of data, covering July through December 2010, we wanted to improve the way we give you the information, so we’ve updated the look of the report and added more details.

We've highlighted some significant changes in the data and provided context about why those changes may have occurred during this reporting period. We’ve also made it easier for you to spot trends in the data yourself. For example, we’ve changed the format so you can now see data on a country-by-country basis. We’re also clearly disclosing the reasons why we’ve been asked to remove content—such as an allegation of defamation or hate speech.