The survey shows that nearly quarter part of their total employees had no public posts done in Google+ for the past three months, and nearly one eighth of the employees have not placed public posts in the past six months.

And this being the year of the Social Media Election in America, Obama’s team chose not to post a message on the network after his landslide victory on Tuesday night. The ‘Four more Years’ image that was posted on twitter subsequently became the  most ‘shared’ image in the history of social media.

So what gives?

Perhaps Google’s push to make Google+ the new cool ‘kid on the block’ among other social media sites has had it’s day. Many businesses collect more leads and business breaks through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn compared to Google+.  It is also being suggested that the +1 button doesn’t affect site ranking like initially advertised.

An interesting quote from Jeff Bullas at jeffbullas.com adds  “Google+’s engagement levels are so low that [they] actually rank behind MySpace and almost any other significant social network you want to mention,” only 70% of users who make a public post, for example, ever make a second one. To add insult to injury in the ‘engagement department’, Bullas says that the average Google+ post has “less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share.”

On a personal level haven’t posted in there for months but can’t necessarily put a finger on why. Maybe I got lazy to inlvove myself in a new social network. Maybe I prefer the higher rate of engagment on facebook and twitter or maybe the brand Google to me, means ‘Search, Analytics and Web Tools’ and the association to Social is just not there!

What do you think?

Bundled inside the new phone’s iOS was ‘Siri’, the new speech controlled personal assistant, which Apple purchased for around US$200 million in April of 2010.

Siri more than the device itself, stole the show and in turn took giant leaps toward the evolution of the way humans and machines can communicate together. The world was abuzz with voice recognition although Apple’s ‘Old Salty’ Steve Wozniak slammed Siri here, saying the app was better pre-apple.

Enter Apple’s nemesis Google and it’s Google search App Version 2.5. The world again is a buzz with voice recognition, but this time on Google’s side as numerous reviews come in saying the App’s voice recognition function outperforms Siri.

Google’s App answers questions more effectively than its predecessor, thanks to integration with Google’s Knowledge Graph, the company’s system for assessing the meanings of queries and for associating related facts. Google’s technical improvements in speech recognition are due to the massive amount of anonymized search query data it collects (the big differentiator), and to data available on the open Web. Google research scientist Ciprian Chelba notes in a blog post that the company’s speech recognition error rate declines as the amount of data available for analysis rises. They even created a research paper on how it does what it does that you can browse through here.

I for one found it hard to put the App down after I started asking ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘why’ and ‘who’ and was pleasantly surprised on the accuracy of recognition and results. You can check out the this review  from cnet.

This obviously heats up the continuing feud between the 2 behemoths and we can now look forward to seeing what Apple’s Siri’s next move will be. Whatever the case voice recognition is here to stay!

Analysing this data is driving both big and small business decisions.

Data is coming in the form of Traditional databases and analytics, Call centre logs, Social Media insights and scores, AdWord search results, Analytics dashboards and email just to name a few.

In our digital communication world companies can use analytical insight to better target influencers with focused marketing and retention efforts, making better decisions about which offers to make to which customers. Entire marketing budgets are now being based on this type of analytical insight.

In traditional business, data-driven decision making is defined not only by collecting data, but also by how it is used — or not — in making crucial decisions, like whether to create a new product or service. Shifting slightly now is the blend of ‘data and analysis’ and ‘gut feeling and experience’.

New businesses are being created solely around helping customers analyze and manage all this data they now have access to.

I would like to finish this short post with a quote from a great blog piece written here by David Karnstedt after attending this years DMEXCO Conference:

“What ties it all together and brings mar­ket­ing to life across both offline and online chan­nels. As I’ve men­tioned, we are see­ing the smartest mar­keters engage in true data acti­va­tion. This is much more than just a look back­wards at what has hap­pened. Data acti­va­tion uses data in real time to influ­ence future out­comes — dri­ving mean­ing­ful busi­ness change and has the power to fore­cast future out­comes. It takes the guess­work out of Media Mix decision-making so mar­keters can focus on cre­ative expe­ri­ences and innovation.

With attri­bu­tion and fore­cast­ing, dig­i­tal and tra­di­tional are com­ing together. We can see how they tie together and how they work. And most impor­tantly, we can see how mar­ket­ing will most likely impact the bot­tom line of the busi­ness tomor­row. As we shift our think­ing around action­able data insights, we will con­tinue to see mar­keters earn and own their seat in the board­room, but, more impor­tantly, we will see the human side of brands reach out and con­nect with indi­vid­u­als beyond any­thing we are see­ing today.”

How is data affecting how you make decisions?

Since then the growth of m-commerce has continued to explode worldwide.

More and more people choose to search and purchase goods and services through their smartphone or tablet device. According to comScore, up to November 2011 there were 38 percent of smartphone owners have used their phone to make a purchase at least once. This statistic is sure to have grown ( I couldn’t find an updated comScore figure ).

Here are some interesting random stats from the four corners of the globe that I found compelling:

Malaysia
Prime Minister Najib Razak said the country’s m-commerce had a milestone year in 2011 as the total spent using mobile devices grew from 101 million ringgit (US$32.7 million) in 2010 to 467 million ringgit (US$151.2 million) last year. This represented a 370 percent jump and formed a quarter of all online shopping last year, he added.

Africa
The M‐Pesa service developed in Kenya has spread quickly, and has become the most successful mobile phone‐based financial service in the developing world. By 2012, a stock of about 17 million M‐Pesa accounts had been registered in Kenya. The service allows users to deposit money into an account stored on their cell phones, to send balances using SMS technology to other users (including sellers of goods and services), and to redeem deposits for regular money. Users are charged a small fee for sending and withdrawing money using the service.

M-Pesa is a branchless banking service, meaning that it is designed to enable users to complete basic banking transactions without the need to visit a bank branch. The continuing success of M-Pesa in Kenya has been due to the creation of a highly popular, affordable payment service with only limited involvement of a bank.

United Kingdom
In the UK e-commerce contributes £45 billion to the country’s economy or 3.1%o of the GDP.

United States
In 2012, mobile sales will account for about 9.2% of all U.S. e-commerce sales compared with 5.4% in 2011 and 9.98 percent of all sales were through mobile devices (inc tablets) – up from 9.35 percent in August. (Affiliate window’s end of September 2012 report)

eBay has reported double digit increases in Q1 2012 to its mobile payment income through Marketplace and PayPal.

More retail sales are coming through mobile devices, both smartphones and tablets, and mobile sales are growing faster than web sales as a whole. In 2012 U.S. mobile commerce sales will grow nearly 10 times faster than U.S. e-commerce sales, which are expected to grow about 16.3% to $226 billion from $194.3 billion in 2011.

Australia
From a mobile study from Google: In terms of mobile banking, Australians were found to be 65 per cent more likely to conduct transactions via smartphone than the British and 14 per cent more than Americans.

In closing
The reason e-commerce has been so successful is that it allows anybody to offer their goods and services to a wider market beyond that imposed by geographical limits. Of note are services like M-Pesa (above) that are ubiquitous in Kenya and South Africa which will surely become more prevalent especially in developing areas, allowing people who live in rural areas to do business beyond the community boundaries.

CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced “This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month”.

With this Facebook had just officially registered one-seventh of earth’s population.

Further Zuckerberg posted “If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you. Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”

Perhaps easier said than done

A slowdown in new-user acquisition is inevitable as its worldwide reach expands. Due to this fact Facebook appears to be concentrating heavily on mobile with, Zuckerberg explaining: “There’s 5 billion people in the world who have phones, so we should be able to serve many more people and grow the user base there,” the ball got rolling in the mobile with their purchase of photo sharing app Instagram in April.

At the end of June the company announced on its website it now has 600 million mobile users, up from 543 million at the end of June. Further the company’s ads on mobile phones are 13 times more likely to be clicked on than ads on the desktop. Renewed faith in the company’s mobile ads has been partly responsible for a mini-rally in its stock, pushing the price above the more dignified threshold of $20 for the first time since mid-August.

Apart from a major push for the mobile space the CEO says he hopes to bring Facebook to China, where it’s currently banned by the government, though he doesn’t think that will happen anytime soon.

Out of interest where do you think Facebook will go in the future?

I thinks it’s a call to take a digital break.

It maybe not easy at first but here are 10 tip’s in rediscovering analog and decreasing digitals’ presence!

- Get outside. Talk a walk in a park or a walk in the forest (not with your iPod or mobile phone)
- Read a book that is printed on paper
- Go to your nearest art gallery and get some good old fashion visual inspiration
- Go for a run, swim or pump some iron
- Sit down and do some painting or sketching, or practice the art of calligraphy
- Do some gardening, paint that wall, fix that door
- Listen to the radio
- Go offline for a day
- If you are in an agency enjoy an active, outdoors team break
- Relax and breathe

We all need to learn to get back to analog and although these tips are obvious, they get misplaced in the digital clutter of everyday life.

I try and enhance this by offering a personal opinion or experience to add value to the audience, YOU, that is consuming it.

So i like to think I am 2 parts curator 1 part author and thought I might share my process below:

Read, read and read some more!
I spend a lot of time scouring the web for topics I think are relevant to talk about here in the Digital Insights blog. Usually I make stops on Mashable, Twitter, TechCrunch, Smashing magazine, The Big orange Slide, Hyper Island, .net Magazine and a host of others.

Choose a topic.
I then try and find a topic that is either current across many channels or something that simply takes my fancy; or something that I have experience in or a strong opinion about.

Add some insight.
Next step is to spice it up a little with some personal insight ‘hence Digital Insights’, which I hope makes it a little more interesting than just regurgitating someone else’s content.

Two good examples.
Other blogs that are created from Agencies with our E3 Agency network that I really enjoy following do this (content curation and creation) really well. Isle of Ideas from Partner Agency Bernstein in Germany and the Madly Blog from partner Agency Truly Deeply in Australia.

These blogs are full of great content and enhance that with smart personal observations, while being on strategy with what these agencies are good at.

Check them out here:
www.isleofideas.com
www.trulydeeply.com.au/madly/

Gone are the days where digital will be designed for a single screen size. Today we find ourselves in a resolution explosion. With thousands of different size screens in our hand, on our desk and in the living room.

With different screen size options continuing to expand and new mobile, computer and TV gadgets making their way to store shelves every day, digital designers have their jobs cut out for them. A few points to take into consideration when planning out a screen strategy  (based on open standards design using HTML/CSS/Javascript) for your next website or app, follow below:

• Creating flexible/responsive designs by using CSS media queries
• Use pixel ratio media queries to assist in designing for different pixel densities (eg: The Retina display iPhone packs 329 ppi compared to the Samsung Galaxy S3 with 306 ppi)
• Use the design tags in CSS as much as you can to generate such things as Gradients, Shadows etc. as these will be pixel density independent
• The ‘text-rendering’ CSS options, specifically ‘optimizeLegibility’ are worth enabling on high pixel density screens.
• Utilising Javascript serve up optimsed images to smaller screens to save on bandwidth
• Try picking a ‘base’ starting point and look at scaling the design and content up and down

This ‘evolution in resolution’, really helps illustrate a point I am quite passionate about, and that is bringing the technical teams and creative teams closer together in collaboration. This will aid in optimising the design to change it’s layout and content depending on what screen it is being viewed on.

Taking the above points into consideration and having the tech and creative teams collaborate closer  will surely save costs, prevent grey hair and produce better results.

She may just be right!

“The new app is built by YouTube engineers, to give our iPhone and iPod touch users the best mobile experience,” said Andrey Doronichev, head of YouTube mobile, in a blog post today.

The app, which weighs in a 7.5MB and requires iOS 4.3 or later, works on both the iPhone and iPad. Doronichev said that work had begun on a native iPad edition, but other than saying it would launch “in the coming months,” did not set a release timetable.

New features touted in the app include:
- New channel guide
- Sharing options including Google+ (fancy that!), Facebook and Twitter
- Speedier search function ala Google Instant
- Multi-task in-page playback
- Advertising (which brings thousands more videos to uses than Apple’s app version)

Google obviously sees the future in mobile (they have a growing app suite list) and released figures yesterday claiming that that 25% of the video service’s daily views were from mobile devices, but did not spell out how important iOS users were to that traffic. Most measurements still give iOS a large lead in mobile video viewing over Google’s own Android.

The app was quickly the No.1 trending app on social App discovery service ‘Crosswalk’.

On my first look the app was fast, search was quick and accurate and I like the quirky, easing animation to bring up navigation to view categories and the videos loaded fast! An around good experience and I think a large improvement on Apple’s offering to date.

Even though it is no longer an iOS standard I think the app will surely draw users back with the soon to be released iOS 6, where Apples YouTube (and Maps for that matter) app’s will be noticeably vacant.

“We fundamentally changed the mobile ecosystem with our original partnership,” Varela said. “This is just the next phase of it.”

Advertisers and others have been using the QR Code now for some time, but to what effect?

There truly are a million-and-one QR Code uses (some good, some bad), and in my opinion it is still one of the best methods of bridging the gap between analog and digital communication. Living up to it’s ‘Quick Response’ title the code let’s user’s instantly access further information. Advertisers and others have implemented QR Codes for uses such as:

- product/loyalty marketing
- commercial tracking
- entertainment and transport ticketing
- storing a company’s information
- storing personal information for use by government
- URL’s, VCards, SMS, Email, Google map, Tweet’s and more
- in Denmmark they are even marking graves with QR codes with the motto ‘everyone has a story’.

So why are people not using them?

I think it has everything to do with our handheld, super-connected, impatient audience; not willing to download a mobile app and open it up and scan a code. So why don’t companies like Apple and Google include it in there camera application that you can launch from your sleep screen?

It would definitely be a right step in making the code ubiquitous and help it gain world-wide adoption. Brendan Mulligan sums it well in this Tech Crunch article.

I will leave this short post with a few questions:
Do you like the QR Code as a technology? and would you utilize them more if they were natively readable on your mobile device?