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Apple, which is expected to formally introduce its latest iPhone to the world on September 12th, could begin shipping the device to customers and selling the handset in retail stores just a week or two later, according to a new report.

Google has about 1,200 employees in England and made £395 million in revenue there last year (that’s just under $620 million). It did, however, only pay £6 million in taxes in England last year. Unsurprisingly, that’s not sitting well with a number of British politicians and according to The Independent, Google could face a more formal investigation into its tax schemes by next spring.

Google bases its international operations in Ireland, where corporations pay a tax rate of just 12.5%. Using a legal tax loophole called “Double Irish,” the company can move a large chunk of its UK profits to Ireland and then Bermuda. There, of course, the company pays even less tax.

According to the Independent, Google’s Irish subsidiary basically employes Google UK as an agent. Because of this, Google’s UK revenue goes straight to Ireland. The Irish headquarter then pays Google UK a 10% fee and, “once costs have been deducted,” that’s all Google UK pays taxes on.

It’s worth noting that the £6 million Google paid for 2011 is significantly more than it ever paid before. In the six previous years, Google only paid £8 million in total. The company has recently made a larger push into England and expanded its engineering team there by about 40% last year.

Here is Google’s statement regarding this matter:

We make a substantial contribution to the UK economy through local, payroll and corporate taxes. We also employ over a thousand people, help hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow online and invest millions supporting new tech businesses in East London. We comply with all the tax rules in the UK.

Google may be taking the ill-conceived Nexus Q back to the drawing board, but the Nexus 7 tablet has been quite a hit since it went on sale a few weeks ago. Since then, though, Google has faced a number of supply issues and the company even suspended sales of the 16GB for a few days to catch up with demand. The latest data from ad network Chitika shows how those supply issues have stalled the growth of Google’s first tablet – at least when measured by web traffic from Nexus 7 owners.

Just a few weeks ago, Chitika reported that the Nexus tablet was on its way to surpass the Kindle Fire in its traffic rankings. By now, the company predicted, the Google tablet was supposed to be ahead of the Fire. Instead, its latest data shows that it’s still trailing Amazon’s tablet by quite a bit. While traffic from the Nexus 7 to Chitika’s network of member sites grew rapidly during the first few weeks after it went on sale, growth stalled over the last three weeks. Chitika reports its tablet data relative to the iPad and the Nexus 7 currently accounts for 0.35 impressions per 100 iPad impressions. That’s virtually unchanged from the 0.3 impressions it reported three weeks ago.

With only a few new Nexus 7 owners surfing the web due to Google’s supply issues, the company’s numbers probably reflect the usage of existing users. ”While the Nexus 7 experienced a huge initial surge in both sales and Web traffic, users don’t seem to be surfing as much as one might expect them to.” As the novelty of the device wears off and as the honeymoon phase comes to an end, people simply don’t use it as much as they used to. Now that the Nexus 7 is back on sale, it will be interesting to see if the growth rate picks up again.

Interestingly, I’ve been meeting more compliance, legal, and governance professionals in meetings involved in brand side discussions around social business strategies.  To understand the needs of this specific role’s goal is to protect the company but enable business to connect to customers Altimeter conduct an Open Research project

My colleagues Analyst Alan Webber and Researcher Jaimy Szymanski interviewed 33 professionals and vendors on the front end of social media risk management and surveyed 92 professionals who said social media risk management was either a significant part or the primary part of their job. The result is our report Guarding The Social Gates: The Imperative For Social Media Risk Management which looks at the newly emerging field of social media risk management.

If you’re a social strategist, (or serve one on agency or vendor side) it’s important you know how to manage risk as you roll out social business programs. Please forward this research report to those who are guarding the gates.

This report includes

• Interviews with 33 professionals of vendor and risk management, including those from top brands.
• Survey of 92 professionals who have a significant part or the primary part of their job in risk management
• Nearly a dozen frameworks, graphics, charts, and flow diagrams

Noodle Labs, the mobile development startup that’s part of Y Combinator’s summer batch, launches today with its newest product: An iPhone and web app called Everyday.me. Co-founders Yu-Kuan Lin (a former Googler who worked on Maps, specifically for China), Weiting Liu (already a YC alum) and Yu-Te Lin (a former engineering lead at Wyse) describe their new app as “Evernote for your life.”

In other words, Everyday.me is a mobile and web-based notebook, with bells and whistles, which allows you to record your life and save those updates indefinitely. It’s a bit like Facebook Timeline were it plugged into all of your social networks and were it tailored to be a personal journal in one timeline.

To that point, an even bigger differentiator and likely a point of appeal for many, is that Everyday.me is a private, personal journal. Users can plug in their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter profiles so that each feed is funneled into the app (with Foursquare, Tumblr next up for integration as well as life-logging apps like Nike+ and Fitbit) and can then tag using Twitter-style hashtags to organize and group posts so they’re easier to digest.

If you’re looking to tame your Twitter feed, it’s not a bad way to organize them, especially if you’re looking for that kind of functionality within the framework of a note-taking and journalizer. Everyday.me adds to its own feed, then, with some basic emoticons and integrates with your iPhone’s camera, so you can upload pics directly.

The founders also said that perhaps the most important aspect of Everyday.me is that it’s available everywhere, on the Web, on your phone (although a few mobile platforms would argue it’s not everywhere, at least not natively), offline and via email. The latter is a nifty little feature, taking a page out of Posterous’ book, meaning that users can update Everyday.me directly from their inbox by sending their emails to post@everyday.me.

The co-founders have developed a Quarterly Report, which will will offer a deluxe print edition of your timeline (complete with infographics), inspired by the Feltron Report. And, for the nostalgic among us, the app has a “Blast From The Past” feature, which sends you (via email) a social media update on where you were on that day in the past.

Everyday.me is obviously competing with a whole mess of different micro-blogging, journalizing, note-taking and life-logging apps and services, so it has plenty of work ahead. The team will have to nail the user experience to set itself apart from the pack and to help do that, I’d really like to see it be translated to tablets. The team says they’re working on an iPad version, but has no timeline for launch as of yet.

Everyday.me at home here.

Video is the undisputed darling of the marketing world in 2012. According to the Cisco VNI Benchmark Report, global internet video traffic will make up 54 percent of all consumer internet traffic in 2016 — up from 51 percent in 2011. Globally, internet video to TV doubled in 2011, while video-on-demand traffic will triple by 2016. In 2011, Strategy Analytics cited 108 billion mobile videos were viewed worldwide; in 2012 that number has already climbed to 280 billion views. Video offers greater retention and recall – up to five times greater than the written word. While the statistics are intriguing and exhaustive, the back story is even more compelling.

Why video?

There are a variety of reasons web-based video is such an important media vehicle, and marketers that understand the nuances will be more successful than the laggards. For starters, video is one of the most efficient and highest life form of media. A 30-second HD video offers four powerful media form factors to marketers: video, audio (podcast), text (transcript), and still images. Each of these form factors can be edited, optimized, syndicated, and promoted across a variety of platforms, including YouTube, iTunes, websites, blogs, Pinterest, and Flickr.

Another compelling reason for marketers to pay attention to video: YouTube is the second most popular search engine by volume. That means your customers are using YouTube to for research in addition to or in lieu of Google, Bing, or Yahoo, This change in behavior provides a new opportunity for marketers: To create a dedicated TV channel on YouTube, complete with original programming and advertising. To be truly effective, a YouTube channel should contain videos for all four stages of the sales cycle: awareness, interest, intent, and purchase. I’ll go deeper into this in a moment.

Video provides the ultimate storytelling medium: If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then how many words is a 30-second video worth at 30 frames a second? Consumers and new organizations alike are catching onto this trend. According to recent research, for the 14 months between January 2011 to March 2012, the most searched-for terms on YouTube were related to news events. For example, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami was the most popular news event on the video network: In the week following the disaster (March 11 to 18), the 20 most-viewed videos related to the tragedy were viewed more than 96 million times.

As an advertising vehicle, video is equally powerful: Online video ads outperform other online ad formats. According to eMarketer, U.S. online video advertising spending will grow 52.1 percent to $2.16 billion in 2011, before reaching $7.11 billion in 2015. Online video’s ad spending growth will far outstrip TV’s growth through 2016. The charts below paint a clear picture for the future of online video advertising:

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A new report released on Wednesday shows Apple and Samsung have all but run away with the U.S. smartphone market and despite having only three models up for offer, the iPhone has generated the most growth during the second quarter of 2012.

David Gould answers: “How Do You Measure Social Media Success With Google Analytics??”

Other Resources

Google Analytics Social Media Reports
Goals & Conversions in Analytics
Social Conversions Report

If you’ve got a question about link building, content, social media, SEO or other Internet marketing topics, just post it on the Vertical Measures Facebook page, or tweet it to us with the hashtag #VMQA.

Transcription

Hi, I’m David Gould with Vertical Measures and today’s question is: How do you measure social media success using Google Analytics? Now it’s an important question for someone who’s looking to move beyond superficial data, like the number of Facebook likes or Twitter followers you have, and get to the metrics that really drive your business.

So taking a look at Analytics, the place to start is in the Social menu under Traffic Sources. On the Social Sources page you can quickly see how much traffic is being driven via social media. Each social platform is listed with visitation stats so you can see which social efforts are actually bringing users to your site.

Under Pages you can see which specific pages on your site are getting traction from social referrals. This can be good, for example, if you’re promoting an event registration, you can see which social channels are getting users to that registration page. Likewise, this can help you pair your social media efforts with specific pages or kinds of pages. For example, you may find that Twitter is the main traffic driver for your blog posts, but that Google+ performs better for product pages.

And finally, in the conversions report, you can see which social referred visitors are converting. This requires that you have goals set up in Analytics, but it’s probably the most crucial part of measuring social media success. Yes it’s nice to get visitors on your site, but at the end of the day you want to convert them, whether that’s buying a product, filling out a contact form, subscribing to an email list.

If you get 1,000 visitors from Facebook but none of them convert, then that probably isn’t the social media success that it might seem if you just looked at site traffic. So watching conversions is key. And the best part is, if you’ve set up values for your goals, then you can see the real dollar value of social media conversions. This can let you know not only what is successful but where and how much to focus future resources on social media.

Now, obviously, this just touches on what’s possible with Google Analytics and social media. So I’ll add some links below to additional references, but this’ll give you a good starting point for measuring your social media successes in a meaningful way.

Related posts:

1. Web Analytics to Measure Your Content Marketing Progress
2. Online Conference to Build Social Media Success
3. Vertical Measures Presents Google Analytics and Conversions Webinar May 13th

Apple was able to get a Samsung internal document admitted in full in its case against the South Korean company on Tuesday, with the report offering a potentially crucial comprehensive side-by-side comparison of the Galaxy S and the iPhone.