1. When did you first join Twitter and why?

I joined Twitter in Aug. 2008 amidst the heated presidential election. I was watching CNN and anchor Rick Sanchez explained that folks should “tweet” him. I had heard of Twitter before then and thought it was silly, but that night I was bored and decided to give it a try. My first tweet was about eating chicken fingers and watching CNN. Then, I sent Sanchez an @ reply. I had no idea what I was doing really, but just gave it a try and started experimenting.

2. If my memory serves me right, you attended President Obama’s inauguration and were inspired by the power of social media. What did you realize while attending the Inauguration?

That’s right! I attended both his Inauguration and the Grant Park rally he held in Nov. 2008, and I was in awe by the use of Twitter especially for both events. The first event I didn’t realize the magnitude of tweets until after it concluded and I caught up on all the tweets I missed during the event. The second one I live tweeted myself and was amazed by the attention that got, getting replies from Australia for instance, and how many others did the same.

3. Shortly after the inauguration you created BreakingTweets.com. Can you describe what breaking tweets was?

Yes. I was inspired by the events mentioned before and I wanted to start a website to aggregate Twitter reactions to major news events around the world. I sought reactions from where the news itself was taking place, so if a news event happened in Amsterdam, I looked for tweets about it in Amsterdam. It provided a very human element to the news and was most interesting when it involved eyewitness accounts.

4. What did Breaking Tweets teach you about collecting news via social media?

I learned several things. First of all, how you have to be extremely careful about the accuracy of reports on Twitter. You have to check the source all the time, find others who confirm the claim, and even in those cases still be skeptical because rumors can fly fast on Twitter. The velocity at which bad information can travel on Twitter (or other social networks like Facebook) is amazing, but similarly interesting is if you have the patience, the bad reports almost always correct themselves on social networks in time. I also learned that people often get really excited when you reach out to them on Twitter, hence the social side of this social medium.

5. You went on to create the first Twitter class taught at the college-level. What did you teach in that class?

Yes, it was an amazing experience and I’m thankful that DePaul University gave me the opportunity. The class was called Digital Editing and it focused on how to track news reports through the real-time Web, ways to verify such reports, the best ways to find them, curate them and present them. It was very hands-on and students learned by using social media themselves and writing up Web articles based on their research.

6. How can a college communication program integrate social media into its curriculum?
Just as news organizations are weaving social media into their daily work, it’s critical that college communication programs seamlessly integrate social media into all their classes. It’s nice to have separate social media classes, but in a perfect world, it becomes part of every class and the students will have experience working with social media that they can tout on their resumes and in job interviews.

7. In your opinion, how has the social media space evolved in the past two years? Where do you see social media headed next?
The most exciting part about social media is the speed at which it’s developed and grown and how it continues to evolve. Social media two years ago is different than social media today, and it’ll be different two years from now. The adoption of sites like Twitter and Facebook by all sorts of industries and the creative uses have grown exponentially, and there will likely be even more ways to use these sites and additional sites like them in the future. It’s fascinating to watch the space evolve and for anyone interested in it, I’d recommend tracking developments by reading up on the latest social media news at every opportunity.

8. Because of your role at Huffington Post, you need to stay on top of the news more than anyone. What are your must-read websites?
Twitter. It may sound silly, but the way I have my lists set up, searches, TweetDeck columns, and so on, I don’t have to chase the news as much; the news comes to me. If you have carefully curated groupings based on your interests, any one can do the same. Of course it’s like RSS of old but with a personal touch; the human side of Twitter, conversations and personalization are what make it so attractive. There are some other sites I’ll check out, but the vast majority of news comes to me through Twitter.

9. How do you disconnect and recharge yourself?
It’s tough and I need to get better at it, frankly! Everyone needs to do it and it’s so important to live a healthy, balanced life to turn those phones off and spend some time away from the computer. I do enjoy going for walks, running, watching movies, and playing on the iPad (turning WiFi off first), all of which I disconnect for a bit. I also like to read but have trouble making time to do so! Have to work on that.

10. Finally, what do you say to the critics who say Twitter is just for people who talk about what they had for breakfast?
Of course it’s not! Maybe a few years ago, and as I said earlier, I started using Twitter myself by proclaiming to (well, nobody at the time, no followers) that I was eating chicken fingers! If you look at the most creative, interesting Twitter feeds though, it’s clearly evolved into a much more mature ecosystem. You just have to hunt for those accounts related to the niches you’re interested in. They’re out there, sometimes tough to find, but when you find them, you’ll likely never see a single reference to food (unless a niche you’re interested in is food itself).

Every Wednesday, we’ll post an interview with a leading social media icon. Last week we featured @JayRosen_NYU. Have someone to suggest? Let us know via twitter @435digital.

The post Social Media Icons: Craig Kanalley on Twitter & breaking news appeared first on 435 Digital.

Web analytics are important for optimizing web usage and play an important role in everything from marketing to accounting. Even if a company has a person solely dedicated to maintaining analyitcs, it is important for everyone to have a basic understanding to learn more about your consumer.

There are a lot of different dimensions to web analytics, but to start off, the three most important stats on are bounce rate, time on site and unique visitors. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who exit the site after the landing page. Like your golf score, you want your website bounce rate to be low. The main objective should be for visitors to click on other pages to your site from the landing page. A simple way to do this is to add hyperlinks into your website copy directing traffic to other areas of the website. It is important for all internal hyperlinks to open up in the same window to decrease site bounce rate. Landing pages can be customized based on keywords when the traffic source is from a search engine.

Though a valuable statistic, bounce rate can be misleading if the landing page is a homepage with a substantial amount of information or a blog. This is when “time on site” becomes useful. Similar to bounce rate, looking at a website’s “time on site” data, one can tell how long visitors are spending on a website and in what areas. This is especially important for businesses to learn the wants and needs of their consumers. 435Digital.com’s analytics indicate visitors want to learn more about social media through our blog posts, hence the creation of Social Media A-Z.

While it is important to know where people are spending their time, it is essential to know who is visiting your site. Unique visitors are the number of unduplicated visitors to your website in a given time. Analytics usually break down data every 24 hours and categorize it by month. Therefore, a unique visitor will only be counted once per day but may visit your site twice a week. To know how many “regulars” your website has, analyze the new vs. returning data.

To get an idea on how many times a person visits your website, divide total visits by unique visitors to get “average number of sessions per unique visitor.”  Knowing how often people visit your site can help you determine how many times you should update your content.

If you or employees visit your website frequently, it is important to make sure these are not interfering with your web analytics. To make sure you are getting the most accurate information install filters on certain IP addresses.

The most popular analytics platform is Google Analyics. It allows you to add a filter in your analtyics settings by going to your filter manager and clicking, create new filter. Depending on what IP address you are blocking, you can name the filter: home computer, work, laptop etc. Google has made it easy by doing the work for you, simply select predefined filter and type in the IP address.

Web analytics are a very powerful tool that when utilized can improve your business and highlight needs you may not have otherwise identified. To get a basic understanding, it is important to know your website’s bounce rate, time on site and unique visitors… and of course, keep reading 435′s Social Media A-Z!—DANNI WYSOKI

The post 435 Social Media A-Z: A is for Analytics appeared first on 435 Digital.

Every company’s social media goals are different, and the reasons for measuring engagement will be different, too. Even so, here are three metrics you may want to consider when measuring social media engagement for your brand:

1.) Avg. # of comments per update
Whether it’s a blog post or a Facebook status update, consider looking at the number of comments as a way to measure fan interest and engagement. If you’re not getting much response from your posts or status updates and it’s a goal of yours, maybe it’s time to take a look at why. Do you finish off your posts with a question or discussion point? Are your posts challenging, colorful or incisive? What can you do to get the conversation started?

2.) # of retweets per topic
If you’re trying to build engagement on Twitter, you want to have content that is sharable. Retweets aren’t the sole metric of Twitter success, but if you want your brand and message to have reach, than the retweet is key. The more your fans share your message, the more your social media audience grows.

3.)Twitter/Facebook to website clickthrough rate
If you’re using social media as a strategy to build traffic to your website, then looking at your social media clickthrough rate is essential. You can track clicks through using a URL shortener like bit.ly or by using web analytics tools like Clicky or Google Analytics. Just because your fans find your Facebook content engaging doesn’t necessarily mean they are taking the time to visit your website as well. Give your social media fans a reason to visit often by linking to new and updated website content, whether it’s a new blog post from staff or a new product for sale.

For all of these metrics, the best way to get real insight from these numbers is to look at trends, not just isolated daily numbers.

Keep an Excel spreadsheet of your engagement metrics, and then cross-reference that with a calendar of your social media campaign tactics. That way you’ll be able to better track whether it was your cool Facebook contest from last month or your hot viral video from two weeks ago that delivered more buzz or traffic to your website.

How does your company measure engagement via social media?—KEIDRA D. CHANEY

The post 3 Ways to Measure Social Media Engagement appeared first on 435 Digital.

ReadWriteWeb confirmed that Twitter will be rolling out new real times analytics with a beta launch in Q4.

I am an analytics/data nerd, and I am ridiculously stoked. Apparently the folks at Twitter acquired analytics startup Trendly and will be absorbing it into the Twitter functionality. According to ReadWriteWeb:

“The product will leverage algorithms similar to the Twitter Resonance concept,” Justin Kistner writes on the WebTrends blog, “in order to show users which tweets are spreading, who is influential in their network, and more. The emphasis is on real time in order to help users make adjustments on the fly to their tactics.”

This is great, and I really hope they will expand the offering to include Twitter integration/retweeting from websites and blogs as a metric as well.

This is awesome and big and a wonderful complement to the data that Facebook provides through insights. Good job, @ev and the gang.—KEIDRA D. CHANEY

The post Data Geeks Rejoice! Twitter to Add Real Time Analytics! appeared first on 435 Digital.

There’s a ton of tools and apps (Klout, Clicky, Twitalyzer, Facebook Page Insights) out there designed to measure social media traffic and engagement, but even so a baseline method of measurement hasn’t yet been established, which can be frustrating for marketers. It’s really easy to get bogged down in numbers and data that are interesting, but ultimately, meaningless when it comes to figuring out your bottom line. So where do you start?

First things first, you don’t have to measure everything.

The best way to attack social media measurement is to establish what your social media objectives are before you start: Are you using social to drive traffic to your company website? Do you want to expand your brand recognition in a new market? Are you using social media for lead generation? Identify the metrics that will give you the insights to answer those questions.

So for example, if your company is using Twitter to drive daily traffic to your website, looking at the number of daily @ mentions won’t help you much, you’ll have to start looking at your visitor numbers from Twitter to your website. If you are looking to expand your market in a new area using Facebook, tracking your new fan count in that particular location will be useful for you, however.

The key is identifying the metrics that measure your company’s objective. There’s no one size fits all with this. The more specific your company’s social media objectives are, the more refined your measurement can be. This could mean as little as 5 – 6 metrics that work for you. Imagine that! No more being bogged down with tons of stats and pages of spreadsheets. You can be lean and mean, and only track the numbers that directly affect your bottom line. Good luck!—KEIDRA D. CHANEY

The post Measuring Social Media ROI Doesn’t Have to Be Tedious! appeared first on 435 Digital.