GraphicMail's Office Move

- GraphicMail Staff, rehearsing their lunch-hour Tai Chi routines -

Soon, the GraphicMail staff in Cape Town South Africa will be packing up their cubicles and say goodbye to the familiar rustic asthetic of their old office building. The prophetic leaders at our company have envisioned that now is the time for us to grab a few hammers and buckets of paint, break through a wall or two and set up shop together as one familiy in a single building.

Come and join us for a complementary lunch-time Tai Chi session on our roof, or a safari through our valley of gadgets and the email newsletter hall of fame. GraphicMail is a multi-lingual, multi-national and multi-cultural organisation, so you can almost always find someone here who speaks your language.  The new headquarters will feature cozy communal areas, floor-space integration between departments, a cappuccino machine that is second to none, a foosball table and a subsidised masseuse service that would even make the most discerning of Google employees cringe.

In conclusions, this move will signal a great milestone here at GraphicMail as we will finally have everything on our wish-list that makes for an optimal, productivity-boosting.

So if you ever find yourself in sunny South Africa, visit GraphicMail at 16 and 18 Dunkley Square, Gardens, Cape Town - or shoot down to our Miami offices if you're in the States.

GraphicMail warmly welcomes all our clients, partners, friends and family to our new location and hope that you will give us the pleasure of your company at our new and improved venue in the years to come.

New Google Plus Engagement Reports and What it Will Mean for Social Share Metrics

With only a fraction of Google users having gotten onto Google+ so far, and due to a minor change Google made in their analytics uptake last week, it is now possible to track the referrals coming to your site from the new social service.

Google+ uses HTTPS to be more secure, but that strips away referrer information that would normally be passed directly to site. Now Google+ will be routed through a plus.google.com domain - which will make it easier to track for direct marketing companies such as GraphicMail that use analytics and social data for conceptualising and measuring campaigns.

Google’s roll-out of the +1 button on their search domains throbbed the digital community into airing much analysis and speculation regarding what consequences this latest raid into social media territory would have for the web 2.0 pantheon.

Among other things, the Google Plus platform, once fully operational, promises to revolutionise social information gathering and how direct marketers measure and tap consumers' social interests when formulating new email and mobile marketing campaigns.

Social data is a relatively new tool and a product of the impressive growth and advertising power of social media. These platforms all share different types of permission-based data about their users that allow marketers to drive more effective email marketing and mobile campaigns, liberating them from doing trend guesswork. And with the approximate 1.5 billion people around the world signed up on social networks, there is no shortage of information to draw from in order to personalise communications.

Social media has made email marketing more complicated, with the scale of management required to fit all the data gears together functionally.

But marketers have the unprecedented opportunity to create bulk email newsletters and mobile campaigns specifically based upon what activities are being logged on social platforms. The data-drilling prowess of social sharing has become the ideal spouse to direct promotions, mandating email and mobile punters to be savvy about social indicators and how to best harvest these metrics.

In the case of Google Plus, the system’s own brand of social data will be utilised as a new criteria for ranking search results. Google officially first started rolling out the +1 button as an indicator in its search results back in March, allowing users to vote for the pages they found the most useful. Two months later Google launched a widget that lets website owners integrate the button into their pages, just like can be done with social widgets for Facebook’s ‘Like’ and Twitter’s ‘Tweet’ buttons. The value of +1 for users as opposed to site owners will likely come from improved search results and also from integration in the Google Plus social network, which is primed to include features like Google “Circles” to rival Facebook “Groups” and other popular peer aggregation services.

Google has also announced that +1 data will be displayed in their webmaster tools, allowing site owners to see exactly how much of an effect +1 has on their domain authority. One will be able to see how many +1 points a given page has in total, and what impact it is having on click-through rates. Google is also now going to provide analytics on any other social widget that has been installed. These social engagement reports let viewers see how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social activities. And the social actions reports let viewers track the number of social processes (+1 clicks, Tweets, Facebook shares etc.) taken on a site. Lastly, there will be a social pages report which allows one to compare the pages on a site to see which are driving the highest the number of social actions.

Social data helps formulate effective campaigns and marketers are in the practice of casting their metric nets wherever they can get the most reliable, most relevant and most rich statistics from.

Even with Facebook topping Google for weekly US internet traffic and sustaining 50% of mobile internet traffic in the UK, the 750 million user strong network will need to recognise the numeric powerhouse that is Google Analytics and how it could rephrase social metric gathering if Google Plus becomes popular. However, the wheels on Google’s new social vehicle will need to pick up much speed before replacing Facebook and Twitter as social metrics mainstays or even becoming a social comparison tool.

GraphicMail makes use of Google Analytics, social logins as well as sharing of our content socially. Our newsletter features equip our clients with social widgets, social share and like buttons in email to motivate the use of social info as a useful, contextual tool for creating effective campaigns.

Friday Corner: Time to get started on that mobile site

Check out this representation of 2010/2011 statistics on Internet Usage in Europe from various sources. Its definitely time to start thinking about getting started on your mobile site. 

 Original video found here