Today is Australia Day – a couple of years ago we decided to celebrate by having a barbeque outside our offices here in Woking. It was snowing, so it was a little cold to say the least, and those sausages never did quite cook properly. The board shorts were definitely a mistake.

This year we thought we needed to do something more substantial, and what better way to celebrate than by opening a full Sign-Up.to office down under. So we have!

Our new office is located in Brisbane and headed up by Brenden Rawson, who previously worked here in our UK office for several years before his native Australia called him home (or perhaps he got fed up with not being able to wear shorts).

We’re really excited about this first step in our overseas expansion. We already work with clients around the world, including many in Australia and this is going to help us provide even better support and services to everyone.

We’ll be rolling out an updated site with more details of our services soon. Meanwhile if you’re in the region and would like to find out more, please get in touch.

Not content with just Australia, we’re also traveling far and wide this year. In February you’ll find us in New York as part of NYCEDC’s London 2 NYC program, and in March we’re off to SXSWi as part of the UK delegation. If you’d like to meet up when we’re there, we’d love to see you, please get in touch.

p.s. We now offer full timezone support across the entire Sign-Up.to platform, if you’d like this enabled for your account, just let us know.

Whether you’re already a social media power user or you’re getting ready to test the waters, Share will change the way you manage your social marketing. We’re really excited about this, as you may have guessed from the teaser videos we’ve put out over the last few weeks.

Social is a huge opportunity for businesses but to get the most benefit it has to be well managed and integrated with other online channels, like email and mobile. We found that there weren’t the tools out there that made this easy enough for a busy marketer to manage. So we went out and built them. It took a while. But we think you’ll like what we’ve come up with.

Share enables you to manage your Facebook pages and Twitter accounts directly from within Sign-Up.to – moving us a lot closer to our aim of making us the single login you need to manage all your one-to-one marketing.

This isn’t simply about posting messages though – it’s about creating truly interactive conversations with your fans and about tracking those conversations so that you can learn from them and constantly improve. We call this Business Class Social Marketing.

Share’s main split-screen view lets you interact with your fans and followers, track posts, comments and tweets in real-time. It’s designed to let you handle lots of interactions with minimum effort – saving you heaps of time.

We wanted to make it simple to stay on top of what’s important, so Share shows you who your most active followers are, lets you monitor the sentiment of comments using ‘Vibe’ and allows you to create private notes for your followers, to help you keep track of your relationships.

So that you can get to know your fans better there’s a Facebook app that you can install to run competitions and mailing list subscriptions on your Facebook pages, with all of the data being stored in your Sign-Up.to lists. Set-up is a breeze, just follow the steps from the new App tab in Share.

Share is available in two versions, both of which can be used on their own or added to an existing Sign-Up.to account.

The standard version is ideal for managing single accounts and comes with all the main features, but without the ability to schedule posts or view detailed analytics.

The Business Class version of Share is for social media power-users and comes with extensive analytics, supports multiple Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts and allows scheduling posts across multiple accounts at once.

As a thank you to all our existing monthly and annual customers, we’re making the standard version of Share available to you free forever and offering the Business Class version free until the end of September, with a permanent discount on the normal monthly price if you choose to upgrade before the end of the month. For details please see the notices in the Share section of your account.

You’ll find Share available in your account when you log in. You’ll need to follow the steps to integrate with Facebook and Twitter to get started. We’ve create a whole new section of the site to talk about the features available in depth, and a host of new tutorials to help you get the most from everything. As always, you can call or email us with any questions.

We can’t wait to see what you do with Share!

We’re proud to be supporting StartUp Britain, an exciting new initiative launched today by Prime Minister David Cameron.

Founded by a group of 8 entrepreneurs, StartUp Britain is a national campaign to encourage enterprise and help new startups.

As part of our support we’ve created a special discounted package exclusively for new UK startups, to help them grow their business with permission-based email and mobile marketing quickly and easily.

There’s no escaping the fact that it’s an extremely challenging time for the UK economy at the moment, and I’m personally a firm believer that encouraging enterprise is a vital part of the recovery process. Initiatives like StartUp Britain, founded by experienced entrepreneurs to help assist new entrepreneurs are a fantastic way to do this, which is why the Sign-Up.to team have pledged their support.

If you’re a startup looking for assistance you should also check out  The Supper Club’s business mentoring scheme which is offering mentoring time to help assist early stage businesses; as part of our commitment to StartUp Britain I’ve committed some of my time to acting as a mentor.

To celebrate the festive season we’ve created a festive Advent calendar and are giving away some fantastic prizes every day.

The calendar runs from the 1st – 24th December 2010 and prizes include bottles of champagne, iTunes vouchers, a digital camera and lots more…

Prizes are drawn daily so be sure to check out the calendar every day!

We’re looking for the very best examples of UK email marketing and to celebrate, we’re giving away a brand new Apple iPad to one lucky winner, as well as 10 Sign-Up.to goody bags! The competition is open to everyone, not just our customers, and we would love to see your creative work!

To be in with a chance of winning, post an image or link to the best, most creative email marketing campaign you’ve run in the last 12 months on our Facebook page. Don’t forget to tell us your name/company name and when the email was sent!

We’ll then select a shortlist of our 10 favourite campaigns and open up the competition to a public vote on Facebook. The winning entry will receive an Apple iPad and shortlisted campaigns will receive an amazing Sign-Up.to goody bag.

The competition dates are:

• Entries welcome up until 27th October
• 1st November. We’ll announce the 10 shortlisted entries.
• 15th November. The competition closes at midnight.
• 16th november. The winning campaign will be announced.

Don’t forget to check out our Facebook page for competition updates and we look forward to seeing your campaign!

Terms and conditions:

• Competition open to UK registered organisations and UK based sole-traders only.
• Campaigns must have been created and sent between 1st June 2009 and 27th October 2010 in order to be eligible.
• The closing date for entries is 27th October 2010. Entries received after this date will not be considered.
• Campaigns can be entered by the agency or end customer only, entrant must be able to provide a copy of the actual HTML code on request.
• Only entries posted to the Sign-Up.to Facebook page will be accepted.
• The shortlist of entries will be selected by Sign-Up.to with the winning entry decided by a public vote.
• Only one vote per person, we reserve the right to discount duplicate votes and disqualify entries where we have reasonable grounds to suspect that fraudulent voting is taking place.
• No purchase necessary, you do not need to be a Sign-Up.to customer to enter.
• By entering the competition the winner agrees to participate in such promotional activity and material as Sign-Up.to may require.
• The prize will not be transferable to another person.
• No cash alternative is available.
• If the advertised prize is not available we reserve the right to offer another prize of equal or greater value.
• We reserve the right to amend these rules at any time.
• This competition is being run by Sign-Up Technologies Ltd. 60 Maltings Place, London SW6 2BX
• Any queries regarding this competition or the rules should be sent to support@sign-up.to
• This competition is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple Inc. iPad is a trademark of Apple Inc.

Based on an analysis of more than 200 million emails (yep, that’s a lot of number crunching we had to do!) sent through Sign-Up.to during the first 6 months of 2010 (where the sender declared their industry sector), the report compares open, click, unsubscribe and engagement rates for more than 23 industries.

Due to some electrical work taking place in our building this weekend, we will be closing our phone, email and chat support desk at 5pm on Friday 7th May, and reopening them on Monday 10th May at 10am.

This final hour of our working week is traditionally quite quiet so hopefully this shouldn’t affect many people, but please try and get any requests in as early as possible to ensure we’re on hand to help. Please note, this will only affect our support systems and will not affect the Sign-Up.to system in any way.

If you have any questions or would like to get in touch with us, please leave a comment in the box below!

At this festive time of year we wanted to give something back, so we’re pleased to announce that voting in our Charity 5 competition is now open!

We’re giving away 5 packages of email, mobile and social media marketing worth over £6,000 each to charities that you choose. Anyone can vote and the 5 charities with the most votes by 31st December will win.

Vote now at www.signup-onlinemarketing.co.uk/charity5/

Join us on Tuesday 22nd September for the next in our series of free seminars. This time we’ll be looking at how you can use analytics to get more from your online marketing.

Join us for free advice, free beer and free food at the great Chicago Ribshack, in London’s Knightsbridge.

We have a few places remaining, you can find out more and register here:
http://www.etickets.to/buy/?e=3412