Good article today in the Wall Street Journal (thanks Cindy) on the use of graphics, links, and logos in email signatures.  As the one responsible for marketing/brand at this company and others, having a standard signature block (or several options as I have learned to do) for employees to use in their email signature can be an exercise in futility – even when trying to promote a link or marketing program as we do here at MessageGate.  Enforcement is difficult and it ranks pretty low on the list of priorities.  That said, there are some issues about unchecked use of these types of things.

When we first began to do our Activity Profiles, we were surprised at both the count and volume of image files causing us to implement a threshold approach to ensure the results were digestible (meaning that there were too many occurrences of .jpg and other image files to be meaningful).  There were so many images of both valid logos and random cats, flowers, and animated icons that we chose to focus only on those deemed egregiously large as a starting point.  Much like me, our customers’ policing of the signature block is part of the brand management program but hardly a priority item and can be invisible to those that are concerned with it.

This story tackles the issue of personalization and how it is moving beyond mainstream email, phone, IM, etc. details to avatars, quotes, and other such images in the name of further personalizing the message.  Maybe I am old school, but don’t really believe the bottom of a company supplied email is the place for you to champion personal causes to unsuspecting recipients or to share pictures of kitty cats doing funny things.  Mostly because, contrary to what most folks think, the email is not yours – it is a company business record and they are accountable for what is in it.  You’d be surprised how much of this exists in corporate email and what both the bandwidth and storage implications can be.  Using our threshold approach above, we see entertainment files (audio, image, video) accounting for upwards of 20% of corporate email volume (GB/TB).  Even if signatures account for just a portion of it, that’s a lot of crap to transport and store in the name of personalization.