It’s hard in this day & age not to see or hear something about Facebook. It is everywhere from the silver screen to your grandmother commenting on your pictures from 2,000 miles away. Facebook has become a part of our daily routine, so it’s not surprising that in a recent survey of digital-media habits from Ad Age/Ipsos Observer: 41% respondents said they want to receive communications from marketers on Facebook- more than double any digital platform. Even more astounding, one in three said it was their “preferred” platform.

What are consumers looking for specifically online? Coupons, coupons and more coupons. With the option to vote more than once, an astonishing 65% of respondents wanted brands to offer them discounts online. But it’s not all about the discounts that respondents wanted: 42% want better customer service, 28% sought branded game and only 22% wanted company news.

What does this mean for you as a business owner? You NEED a Facebook presence. And not just a presence, but also clever social media tactics that give your consumers reasons to keep coming back to your page, time and time again. Facebook is great for top of mind awareness, public relations and directing traffic to your website. All in all, there’s a huge consumer demand out there for brands to be on Facebook. Let GCI help you meet those demands head on! Give me a call & let’s chat about it!

Happy Facebooking!

- Carly 360.786.9657 ext. 104

Typekit features a wide-variety of faces for headlines, body copy and illustrative areas

Here at GCI we’re big fans of typography. For the longest time using great and unique fonts on the web was totally impossible unless you wanted to make them into an image (which is bad for SEO).

Enter: Typekit

Typekit is a slick way of inserting fonts for use on the web without infringing type foundries rights, and maintaining good SEO.

With just a couple lines of javascript code and a bit of simple setup on typekit’s site you can replace entire swaths of text on your website with a font from their extensive (and growing) library of available faces.

We’ve used Typekit on the PaperStone website and our new website design (notice the condensed sans-serif you’re reading right now). There are a couple new sites coming down the pipes using it too!

It probably doesn’t get many excited to talk about fonts. But hey, we’re excited and it’s just another way GCI is keeping our clients on the leading edge of web technologies and elegant design.

-Paul

Check out this photo, then walk-no RUN to the donut shop (you’ll need the cardio) and get yourself one!

-Paul

The team celebrated Cinco de Mayo this week in true Latino style! We decided to spice up this week’s staff meeting with a Mexican themed potluck featuring delicious nachos, homemade guacamole, sopapillas and strawberry & lime margaritas (virgin…of course).

The team also went the entire day using only our Spanish names. If someone used our regular names, they had to pay up a quarter!  Nametags were a must to keep from breaking the bank. We all had a great day celebrating Cinco de Mayo!

Paulo was sad his delicious margarita was gone

Homemade Sopapillas !

Google is cooking up a new web product called “Google Wave”.

It’s difficult to explain, but the gist is that rather than email being a package that gets delivered from point A to point B. Google instead is treating the ‘email’ as a destination. A single package that users can connect to, edit, make additions and then notify others connected to it that it has been changed. The changes that Wave will allow you to perform include basic text editing (like email) but takes it many steps further. Easily add audio, video, polls, translations, images and just about any other media to the Wave.

The glorious thing about this is that it would mark an end to long and confusing “reply to all” email chains helping to keep everyone on the same page and make clear who is contributing what to the conversation.

In certain cases when multiple people are editing a Wave the edits will appear on everyone’s screen in real time! It’s more like having a real conversation and thus can be a huge time saver, protect bunnies and possibly keep the senior citizens in Florida from getting sun burned.

Wave is currently in beta (and probably will be for a very long time) but some invitations have been dispersed. If you’re interested leave a comment (with your email address) and I’ll send you one!

-Paul

-Jenny

1. To use any of these wallpapers click on your desired resolution (not sure which? 1600×1200 is a pretty safe bet for most monitors).
2. Once the image fully loads in a new window right-click and select ‘set as desktop wallpaper’ or some similar option (may vary from browser to browser).
3. Voila! New desktop hotness, straight from our brains to your computer! Hooray!

Enjoy! -The Team

Who Fruited?

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What is art?

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Sand Face

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Let Them Advertise

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Light Writing

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-Paul