Google Analytics, one of my best friends

If the last week it was compulsory to write a post about Twitter, this week we have to write about another tool, Google Analytics. Last week maybe I was very hard with the blue bird, but it was my personal experience, however this week I have a very good opinion about how Google Analytics can help to the Public Relations career.

This tool offers a lot of possibilities to measure the efectiveness of a digital campaign to the PR practitioners: who looks your website, where the person is from, when he looks the website, what post had more visits and why the person accessed to the website (directly or not), moreover than how long the person visited the website (the 5 Ws of the journalists). Like you could see in the video tour about Google Analytics, you can have in your desk different information and graphs about data of your website.

This new tool, not only offers new possibilities to PR people to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign, they could also offer a new service to the clients, monitoring. With both of these services, the PR agency could make changes at the moment or maybe, wait for the future to get better the campaign.

On the other hand, I think that it is important to say that this tool is free for everyone, so maybe, some small companies or organizations could obtain results of their campaigns by themselves without spend any money, since they only need to know how they have to introduce the code.

Google Analytics is my big discovery of the module of digital media and I hope that it can help me as a PR practitioner in the future.

Images: Flickr and www.webdigi.co.uk/blog

Be careful with your comments!

Reading the last week the digital version of El Mundo, the second newspaper with more circulation in Spain, I saw one blog about technology called "El Catalejo".

The post of the day was focused on the opening of a new tool of search of Google after several months of practices. Now Google gives the possibility of the users of finding not only web pages, blogs or images, also comments in Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed. You can see one example in this video.

The post discusses about the problem of publishing your personal comments in a search engine because, can a machine distingues between a joke and a private comment? Are my comments with my friends important in the search of other people? The author accuses the social media of not having a good privacy policy because one thing is that you can communicate via Twitter, in an open space, and another is that your comments appears in the screen of millions of users in Google.

After reading that, I wanted to try it. I searched "Real Madrid" in Google and I found several "tweets" about the match of yesterday against the Getafe:

I entered in Twitter and I wrote a comment about the topic, because I wanted to know if it is going to appear or not. This was the result, I was frigthtened, I am the first one in the list:

This experiment has thought to myself about if we are preparing to the social media (why are we frightened when Google publishes our comments and not when we have our profile in Facebook or Twitter opened to everybody?) and if we know the importance of our actions when we use them (why are worried when our name appears in Google and not for example in Facebook where all our data appear?)