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

Twitter does not tweet me

This post is one of the most difficult for me because I need to write about my experience with Twitter but, what experience? Like I did not have any idea about how to start this text, I saw some of the post of my classmates about the topic. Some of them love this tools and other like me do not feel neither love nor hate (I do not know what it is worst).

I opened my Twitter account approximately two months ago for my Digital Media module. I had listened some thing about this tool, but in that moment, it did not attrack me some much, and I thought that maybe with the use my perception would change, but not!

I have only used it once a week to tweet my classmates with the links of my new posts, but no more. I did not get caught on Twitter like for example with Facebook in which I check my account every minute, maybe because it is more personal.

Twitter can be the best tool to find information in a special moment about proffesional and personal issues, because you can receive answers of different parts of the world in only few seconds, but I think that it is not the best tool to communicate with other people because you have limmits in the number of words and if you do not how to use the tags, your message will be lost.

During the course I have tried to convince myself about the usefulness of Twitter to develop public relations campaigns, but nobody in class could show me one good example of that, so if I was an organization I would have a Twitter account only for having corporate information and tweet news about the company, but I would not use it to launch a public relation campaign.

Sorry blue bird, but I can not listen your tweets!!!

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?)

Twitter´s @anywhere

This week thousand of technology websites and blogs published the news about the new project of Twitter, @anywhere.

On Tuesday 16th, Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, presented this new application during "South by Southwest Interactive Conference", in Texas.

This new service allows to the users write their comments in Twitter without enter inside the program, otherwise while they are connected to other web sites like YouTube, eBay, The New York Times or Amazon, they can leave their comments. Moreover, this application allows to the users to see information about one person or company which has a Twitter account, without leaving the web sites that they are visiting, when they put their mouse on the link, a pop-up will open and they can see information about this link, like for example, the last "tweets" of one account, Williams explained that with one example.

This new application of Twitter is an example that the social media continue to advance and not everything is just done.


Picture: http://www.muyinternet.com/

Educate using social media

Nowadays, when we think about social media like Facebook or Twitter, we only see the funny point of view: share photos, comment the wall of our friends, keep in touch with the world every second, etc., but I think that it is time to introduce these tools in the education of teenagers and university students (under and postgraduated).

Social media could provide a lot of vantage in an university class: more participation of the alumni, research of examples in the web, share of contents outside the class and the most important aspect, knowledge about how to use in a responsible way these tools. One experiment about social media in the University is showed in this video.

After seven years at a Spanish University where I studied a little bit of Photoshop, editing video and audio, blogs and Microsoft Office, I did not learn anything about social media. Is Microsoft Office Word the future or the social media? Nowadays, everybody knows more or less how to use Microsoft Office and how to send e-mails, but not how to use the new tools that Internet provides, and I think that this gap could be cover for the new PR practitioners. We do not need the same preparation than practitioners ten years ago, the technology is changing everyday.

I think that the introduction of social media in the University and High School could get better the formation of the future proffesionals and moreover, teach to these target of people how to use them, because the majority learn alone and they do not have any idea about the power of these tools.

For all these reasons I think that social media should be a compulsary subject.

Picture: http://www.webintenta.com/Iconos/6/