Here’s a few pics from the day. You can see more over on our Facebook page (remember to “Like” us, if you haven’t already)

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Baby Bree - the calf

I had an exciting Saturday afternoon when one of the cows in the field at the back of our house gave birth to a gorgeous calf!

I arrived just after she had been born (thankfully I think, as she had to be pulled out hooves first by the farmer with a bizarre contraption!). Paul, the farmer told us that she would stand up after about 20 minutes but after 2 hours she was still lying on the ground with only one attempt to get up. Paul came back later and with much cajoling and force she stood up Bambi-esque and wobbling a lot.

I named her Daisy that night (very original and she isn’t even mine to name!), but after speaking to Paul’s wife the next day who informed me they already had a Daisy I renamed her Bree! There is a bit of logic to this! Her Mum is called Wisteria – Wisteria Lane – Desperate Housewifes – hence Bree! If there are any more girls then they shall also follow the ladies of Wisteria Lane accordingly!

Today she is gambolling around the field very cutely – I shall enjoy watching her progress.

Despite email and social media being the two leading areas where businesses plan to increase their spend in 2010, and with 69% of businesses planning to integrate the two, there is very little information out there on how they measure up, let alone interact with one another.

Being the statistics-obsessed folks we are, we decided to get our hands dirty with Google Analytics and study the relationships that our site has with Twitter, Facebook and our newsletters. Along the way, we’ll also touch on some of the aspects of social media that aren’t so easy to measure.

Lets compare email and social media’s role:

As traffic-driving tools
As a means to attract new visitors to your site
As engagement-drivers

Using email and social media to drive traffic to your site

Depending on how much effort you put into your monthly newsletter or social media efforts, the capacity for each channel to drive traffic to your site can be quite variable. We found that a whole month of Facebook updates and tweets drives roughly half as much traffic to our site as our monthly newsletter does over the same period, meaning that the social media crowd (roughly 9% of this combined audience) generated 30% of resulting traffic from Facebook, Twitter and email:

That said, it is difficult to separate follower traffic from what’s generated by retweets – being one of the very cool advantages of using Twitter. Another intangible is the propagation of fan page content and recommendations to Facebook feeds and pages – the traffic generated from this can’t be easily coupled to the fans you have.

Unlike Twitter and Facebook, email’s capacity to drive traffic has a long tail. Whereas the traffic from Twitter and Facebook comes in bursts lasting as long as it takes for the message to fall off the bottom of the feed (2-3 days), email continues to collect clicks and opens for days (if not weeks) to come. Using the example of our November newsletter, the proceeding 3 weeks drove as much traffic to the site as the first 48 hours after the send. In fact, we still received an outstanding 1,456 clicks through to our site from the newsletter in the third week!

What does this tell us?

• Nurturing even a modest social media community can generate considerable traffic – on average, these followers and fans tend be more responsive than email subscribers, too. Is it because of the participatory nature of social media?
• Email has a very long tail, so consider the timeliness of your message. If a subscriber returns to your email three weeks later, will they still want to click-through?

Using email and social media to attract new visitors to your site

Now that we’ve looked at the number of site visitors received from email and social media sources respectively, lets look at how many of these people had either never visited our site before, or haven’t dropped by in a long time. The results were surprising:

6% of email subscribers who had received our newsletter and consequently clicked through had not visited since March, 2009 (when we made significant changes to our Google Analytics tracking). A lesser percentage of new visits came from Twitter and Facebook respectively. Although these figures may not be indicative of genuinely “new” visits, they do show that a considerable number of subscribers, followers and fans had not visited our site in at least 8 months (if at all). Instead of unsubscribing or unfollowing, they simply hung around, then finally took action on a relevant tweet or newsletter.

What does this tell us?
Email is just as relevant a channel as social media for initiating a relationship and introducing new or lapsed visitors to your content. If you provide a more ways to connect to your brand, you may find that a significant part of your audience may be in touch with you via email or following your tweets, but never actually viewed your site!
Even if an email subscriber hasn’t responded to your email newsletter in the last few months, don’t dump them – segments of your list may be simply waiting for the right offer to come along.

Using email and social media to drive engagement
Once all these visitors arrive via email and social media channels, what do they do? We tallied the average number of pages each visitor went to after arriving at our site and found that on average, Facebook fans visited 1.7 pages more than email subscribers and 2.79 pages more than Twitter followers:

This also reflects what seems to be a loose relationship between the percentage of new site visitors and their willingness to explore a site. Also, from our own link-sharing experience on Twitter, it’s indicative of a tendency to click a link in a tweet in order to snappily read a single article, in opposition to the leisurely site experience that Facebook promotes.

What does this tell us?

• Consider your landing pages and extended site experience – if it takes more than three pages to achieve a goal, you may have lost most of your Twitter visitors and certainly a lot of your email subscribers along the way.

We’re all in this together

Email, social media and your content should be viewed as a collaborative effort. When you integrate your channels (eg. Add an email signup form to Facebook, or links in your newsletter to your Twitter page), any one of your subscribers can be interacting with you across half a dozen social networking sites, plus receive your tweets and email newsletters on a regular basis. To say one channel is more successful than the other is misleading, when they ultimately flow into one another to create, in marketing speak, what is a multi-touch brand experience.

About this data
Email, Twitter and Facebook were chosen for this comparison as all three channels leverage the same content from our blog and gallery. Data was collected using Google Analytics over a one month period.

We’d love to know how you combine email and social media. Do you regularly use Twitter to promote your newsletter? Has your email resulted in more Facebook fans? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.

Here at Cloud 9 we’re proud to show off our latest exhibition stand job – for Morsø stoves at the National Homebuilding and Renovation Show at the NEC.

The show has been open for the last couple of days and business is brisk (and due to get busier as visitors arrive over the weekend).

Our brief was to showcase the premium Morsø’s brand and products, whilst being mindful of a tight budget.

Cloud 9 organised the whole presence for Morsø; including:

• Stand space negotiation and booking
• ‘Real fire’ flueing
• Stand design
• Stand build
• Marketing collateral
• Pre-show awareness

Check out more photos in this gallery…

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The National Homebuilding & Renovation Show is open to the public and runs at the NEC

18 – 21 March 2010

We’ve made it much easier to personalise your email campaigns with regular content tags such as ‘First name’ and ‘Email’. But with this update, you can now also add custom fields from your subscriber list’ and lots of variations of today’s date. The former should be especially useful if you’re planning to personalise your email with nice details such as the subscriber’s location, interests or even a message like, “We’re glad you were referred to us via a friend, please let everyone know about our store, too!” (where ‘a friend’ is the value in a ‘Referrers’ custom field):

We made it really easy to add quick links such as ‘Forward to a Friend’ and ‘Unsubscribe’ via the editor – they’re all available via a drop-down menu. In addition, we’ve given you more control over colors and formatting via the toolbar:

You can resize your editor window, too:

It’s been a big week for email templates and the WYSIWYG editor in general. Let us know what you think of the updates – we hope it makes working with email templates a much easier and more time-efficient task.

Well lucky you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjN5avRvApk

The WordPress dashboard is easy to set-up, customise and use the way you want to. This video walks you through its features. -

Diving into drafts from the dashboard

If you want to get right back to a recent draft, you can now dive in right from the dashboard’s Recent Drafts pane. This video walks you through what’s on offer. -

Saving and returning to draft posts & pages

If you’d like to save your work and come back to it another time, without putting it out for the world to see, WordPress gives you various draft options. This video talks you through the process. -

Using Quick Edit and Bulk Edit to manage your posts in half the time

Quick Edit and Bulk Edit are two features that will make it easier for you to quickly make changes to single posts or a whole bunch at once. This video shows you how. -

Rearranging the post editor to suit your style

The WordPress post editor lets you set it up to suit you – this short video shows you how you can configure it to taste. -

Writing and publishing a post

The thing you’ll probably be doing most with WordPress – writing and publishing posts – is covered in this short flyby tutorial. -

Embedding photos, video & audio into your posts

If you’d like to insert photos, videos, audio or other media into your blog posts, this video will walk you through the basics. -

Adding categories and tags to your posts

Categories and tags help to organize the content in your blog, and make it easier for people (and Google) to navigate through to find what they’re looking for. In this short video, we’ll take a look at how to add and manage both. -

Publishing your post at a later date

If you’d like to set a post to publish at a future date, WordPress makes it easy. Here’s how to do it. -

Moderating your recent comments from the dashboard

If you want to get a quick glance at your latest comments, or moderate them right from the dashboard, this video will walk you through the feature. -

Getting a post out quickly with QuickPress

If you want to quickly get a post out without the trimmings of the main editor, QuickPress makes it simple to publish right from the dashboard. This short video walks you through it.

Ask a grown-up to download the PDF and then print it out so you can try colouring it in too.

If you do a good job, ask your grown-up to scan it, or take a photo, and email it to us.

We’ll put it on our website for everyone to see.

Rabbit Picture 1

Download the PDF

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Rabbit Picture 2

Download the PDF