Original image found here.
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Friday 26 August 2011
Tuesday 23 August 2011
3 Email Marketing Headlines you shouldn't miss (because there aren't really any others)
The email, mobile and social marketing world is experiencing a general slump in newsworthiness this week and this makes us think, and hope, that somewhere in Silicon Valley, at the Googleplex or any other hotbed of technology, some innovative developer is performing the finishing touches on the next big app, mobile tool or email feature.
We are holding thumbs - but in the meantime, let’s look at the top 3 email/mobile/social communication happenings of this week that are, at least somewhat, of headline material:
1) Google adds friend notations to their +1 Button
No surprise here. Google, in an unprecedented streak at copying other social platforms, is making the +1 button more social with the addition of friend annotations. You may have already noticed faces and names when you hover over a +1 button, displaying a list of friends and contacts that have already clicked the +1 button for that page.
You can make these recommendations even more visible to your user, by updating the +1 button code, which will allow an inline annotation will show next to the button. This feature works much like how the Facebook ‘like’ button appears, displaying how many people have +1′d the page and which friends have +1’ed it.
Though it will likely make the +1 button a bit more sticky, this change is very small and the search giant will need to do more though to be socially competitive.
2) Twitter enhances profiles with Image galleries
It’s been a long time coming - over the last few months, Twitter has been rolling out some key new enhancements to their user experience, adding improved search functionality and the ability to upload images right from a user’s Twitter stream. Now your photos will soon be featured on your Twitter profile in an image gallery.
Twitter has gone live with user galleries, which will automatically display the 100 most recent images the user has shared via Twitter from supported photo-sharing services (such as yFrog, TwitPic or Instagram).
Galleries will live on a user’s profile and highlight a few recent images. The update will change the appearance of Twitter profiles and is designed to entice Twitter users to add more photos to their tweets (i.e featuring their cat, a planking event, or what they had for breakfast; as per the usual Tweeting habits). For those not seeing the new photo option in your user profile yet, the image galleries should be popping up within the next day.
3) Facebook’s ‘like’ button comes under fire
Ironically, Google might be forced to reconsider their above-mentioned modification - as Facebook has taken strain during the past week about their ‘like’ button social data and whether this is gathered in respect to certain countries’ privacy laws.
Facebook has been pressured recently by Germany’s head of their independent data protection center; who’s claimed that websites that use the ‘like’ button are illegally sending this data to the social giant, who in turn uses that information to create illegal profiles of its users’ web habits. Citing both German and EU privacy laws, demands are being made that websites in the state of Schleswig Holstein remove the ‘like’ button by the end of September 2011.
It is not uncommon for online service providers to set different policies in different countries in order to comply with the differences in various national laws. But while this is, for the moment, limited to one state, such issues have a tendency to take on a national, and then an international scope. So marketers who are increasingly basing their strategies on Facebook’s ‘like’ button and similar clues may have some cause to be alarmed if the policy becomes widely adopted.
Though GraphicMail will keep its clients posted should the laws change for our destination countries, everyone should keep using ‘like’ until such changes come into play - if at all.
We are holding thumbs - but in the meantime, let’s look at the top 3 email/mobile/social communication happenings of this week that are, at least somewhat, of headline material:
1) Google adds friend notations to their +1 Button
No surprise here. Google, in an unprecedented streak at copying other social platforms, is making the +1 button more social with the addition of friend annotations. You may have already noticed faces and names when you hover over a +1 button, displaying a list of friends and contacts that have already clicked the +1 button for that page.
You can make these recommendations even more visible to your user, by updating the +1 button code, which will allow an inline annotation will show next to the button. This feature works much like how the Facebook ‘like’ button appears, displaying how many people have +1′d the page and which friends have +1’ed it.
Though it will likely make the +1 button a bit more sticky, this change is very small and the search giant will need to do more though to be socially competitive.
2) Twitter enhances profiles with Image galleries
It’s been a long time coming - over the last few months, Twitter has been rolling out some key new enhancements to their user experience, adding improved search functionality and the ability to upload images right from a user’s Twitter stream. Now your photos will soon be featured on your Twitter profile in an image gallery.
Twitter has gone live with user galleries, which will automatically display the 100 most recent images the user has shared via Twitter from supported photo-sharing services (such as yFrog, TwitPic or Instagram).
Galleries will live on a user’s profile and highlight a few recent images. The update will change the appearance of Twitter profiles and is designed to entice Twitter users to add more photos to their tweets (i.e featuring their cat, a planking event, or what they had for breakfast; as per the usual Tweeting habits). For those not seeing the new photo option in your user profile yet, the image galleries should be popping up within the next day.
3) Facebook’s ‘like’ button comes under fire
Ironically, Google might be forced to reconsider their above-mentioned modification - as Facebook has taken strain during the past week about their ‘like’ button social data and whether this is gathered in respect to certain countries’ privacy laws.
Facebook has been pressured recently by Germany’s head of their independent data protection center; who’s claimed that websites that use the ‘like’ button are illegally sending this data to the social giant, who in turn uses that information to create illegal profiles of its users’ web habits. Citing both German and EU privacy laws, demands are being made that websites in the state of Schleswig Holstein remove the ‘like’ button by the end of September 2011.
It is not uncommon for online service providers to set different policies in different countries in order to comply with the differences in various national laws. But while this is, for the moment, limited to one state, such issues have a tendency to take on a national, and then an international scope. So marketers who are increasingly basing their strategies on Facebook’s ‘like’ button and similar clues may have some cause to be alarmed if the policy becomes widely adopted.
Though GraphicMail will keep its clients posted should the laws change for our destination countries, everyone should keep using ‘like’ until such changes come into play - if at all.
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