Using Google Analytics

By Toivo Mvula

I have been using Google Analytics (GA) to track the number of followers to my blog.
I have to admit that using it was quite fun and it put a smile on my face everytime I studied the statistics.

Knowing that people were actually reading my blog posts or just checking it out was quite exciting.

It may probably not be an excellent tool, but it certainly does a good job.

Google Analytics collects statistics of visitors visiting a specific website. According to Wikipedia, GA is the most widely used website statistics service with 57 percent of the 10 000 most popular websites currently using it.

Back to my blog statistics, GA indicates that I’ve had 243 visitors since I started blogging in late February, but my visitor count (on my blog) indicates 356 visitors. This is probably because I only started using GA more than a week after I set up my blog.
I’ve had 627 page views since I started blogging.

The average time that visitors spent on the blog was five minutes, which is a clear indication that they read the information on my blog.
The visitors were from 12 different countries, namely the United Kingdom, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda, United States of America, Bahrain, Canada, Russia and Romania among others.
Most of them (81, 4 %) used referral sites to visit the blog. About 16.5 visited the site directly and 2 percent used search engines.

Web analytic tools are very useful not only for measuring website traffic, but also for determining your return on investment (ROI) after the launch of a PR or communication campaign, and also for doing business and market research.

However, some bloggers whose only objective is too make money claim to have millions of visits a month to attract advertisers, but fail to indicate how long the visitors stayed on the site.
Another disadvantage of web analaytic tools is that they don’t indicate whether visitors read or absorbed the information on the website.

But it is still a very useful tool and I will definitely use it in future.

Should You List Your Social Media Skills, Like Using Facebook, On Your CV?

By Toivo Mvula

Several social media experts have commented on the importance of public relations practitioners in mastering social media skills.
Others have stated that there is a social media talent vacuum in the communications field, namely advertising, public relations and marketing.

A study by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) also found that masterial social media was one of the top three issues for public relations practitioners for the next two years.

Many tertiary education institutions offering PR courses heed the call and are now offering social media related modules as part of their courses and established practitioners are applying for short social media course to jump onto the social media bandwagon.

But!

With many employees fired from their work for using Facebook and other social media websites during working hours, is it a good idea for public relations practitioners applying for a job to indicate on their CV that they are knowledgeable in the use of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.?

Mashable reported that 8 percent of US companies dismissed someone for their behaviour on social media sites.

The problem is, not all employers understand the importance and increasing use of social media in public relations, nor do all organisations use or intend to use social media for their communication.
Most employers, if not all, block access to Facebook during working hours and only allow access before work and during lunch hours.

Potential employers might also perceive you as a gossip and, rightly so, see you as a threat to corporate secrets, because social media is a corporate reputation disaster if used incorrectly.

Listing your social media skill may seem like a risk to some, but it is important to do research on the organisation you are applying to, like finding out if they use social media; how they use it and understanding their social media policy.

Even if you don’t list your social media skills on your CV, you can still point it out during the interview and explain to the interviewing panel about the benefits of using social media and how a social media policy can erase their fears of reputation management.

Image by San Francisco Sentinal

Are Mobile Technologies Effective in PR campaigns

By Toivo Mvula

The use of mobile technologies in PR campaigns has remained stagnant, partly because the mobile phone is a personal tool and organisations have not yet found an acceptable way of communicating with mobile phone users without being seen as invading their personal space.


The use of mobile technologies in PR campaigns is largely limited to incorporating the internet, because using text messaging (SMS or Short Message Service) is seen as rather intrusive.

Other types of mobile technologies are laptops, notebooks and the media tablets such as the new iPad and WePad.
All these can be used to browse the internet, check your e-mail, access your Facebook and Twitter accounts and other social networking sites, watch YouTube and other video sharing sites.

The mobile phone is the seventh mass media after print, recordings, cinema, radio, television and the internet.

With more than four billion mobile phone users across the globe, the potential of using mobile phones in PR campaigns is huge.
Other advantages of mobile phones is that they are always switched on and users carry them 24 hours, 7 days a week.

Public relations practitioners can use mobile phones in PR campaigns the same way they use internet. The only difference is that everything should be customised to mobile phone specificiations to allow for easy acess and use.
This can be done by:

- purchasing a .mobi domain name to create a mobile website;
- developing Apps for mobile phones;
- launching a mobile website blog; using text messaging (SMS);
- RSS feeds;
- conducting surveys;
- have 24/7 contact to the media; and
- accessing social media to monitor public opinion and respond accordingly.

What is really important is that PR practitioners recognise the potential of mobile phones and other technologies and incorporate them into their traditonal PR campaign strategies to achieve the maximum outcome.
For more information, you can read a PR Week article on the use of mobile technologies in the PR industry.

Wikipedia and Online Reputation Management

By Toivo Mvula

The internet has given public relations practitioners many tools to use to communicate with an organisation’s internal and external publics, the media and other stakeholders.

These tools range from emails, websites, blogs, social networking sites, and search engines among others.
One tool that seems to have been largely ignored is the wiki.

Although some companies use wiki for internal communication, only about 18 percent of public relations practitioners use wiki for public relations purposes.

Wikis are websites with pages that can be edited by any visitor. Wikipedia is the most popular wiki and currently ranks high on the search results of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Hickerson and Thompson believe that wiki websites creates the potential for dialogical communication (public relations) for organisations and their publics.
However, many public relations practitioners regard wiki websites as posing a great risk for corporate reputation management.

If any person can edit a wiki page with information that is believed to be the truth about an organisation, then what influence remains for public relations practitioners?
The low use of wikis in public relations could be an indication that the risks outweight the benefits of using them to communicate and developing relationships with publics, especially the external public.

A study by DiStaso, Messner and Stacks examining Wikipedia’s implications for corporate reputation managment found that ten Fortune 500 companies Wikipedia pages was largely netural, but almost 40 percent of the content was either positive or negative.

In most cases, organisations are not responsible for creating their wiki pages on for example Wikipedia.
But internet users do not know this. The wiki pages look like they are part of the organisation because they have links to company websites and use real company logos.

Although PR practitioners are reluctant to use wikis for communication, they need to monitor what is being said about their organisations on Wikipedia and other wikis.
If any person can edit wiki pages, then PR practitioners can also edit the wrong information on their organisation’s wiki page.

This will prove to be even more difficult, especially due to the fact that Wikipedia is now even more multilingual with over 100 active language editions and reaching over 50 million users a day, which makes it hard for a PR practitioner to know what has been edited on an organisation’s page in all language editions.

Still, if they simply ignore it, internet users will regard the information as the truth.