Quite recently, I saw a video(embedded below) from Google on Social Search. Although it seems pretty impressive and good, but I have some questions/thoughts from Marketing/SEO point of view:

• Since users will now be able to see suggestions/blogposts/tweets etc from our contacts, so this opens are whole new platform for Social Media Marketing i.e. if you have established yourself as a friendly guy in any popular social media platform like Facebook, and you are an open Networker i.e. who adds other people as friends without any previous acquittance, then you have a very huge opportunity that you can influence and market a huge number of audience in many diverse niches, all you need is quality content on various topics with a touch of SEO and Google will do the rest of work for you,
• The downside is that now we will see even more social media SPAM
• I am eager to know what will be your stance on this change in SERPs?

• Will you establish yourself as an open networker ?

• If Yes, what will the effects on your personal life? Will you manage multiple accounts? What will be the ethics in this case?

• If No, will you miss this opportunity? Will this refrain others from using social media for even more marketing purposes?

• What can be best practices,ethically, to use this opportunity to market products and services on social media, with special reference this recent update?

I will try to answer this in my coming posts, but I need your feedback too.

Here are the quick and easy steps to implement, if you want a report of website traffic, excluding a specific country or territory.

However,it should be noted that, it is among the best practices to create new test profiles when you are testing our filters or other advanced analytics setups. The reason is that it is not unusual that some of your experiments might turn out to be wrong or do not meet your specific requirements, if you have multiple profiles, then you can safely delete the newly created one without loss of critical data. You should have one untouched raw analytics profile, always.

Having said that, lets move towards our setup, I have already created a new profile for the same website and name it “Filtered Traffic”

As soon as you create the new profile, click the edit button and scroll down to see the “Add New Filter” option.

Kindly note that Google Analytics have 2 types of Filter Setups,i.e. Predefined and Custom, we will select the Custom Filter.

Now select the Visitor Country option to mention the excluded region.

Now in the “Filter Pattern” box, enter your desired value or values.e.g. Filter Pattern: brazil|Argentina

Note:The pipe symbol | allows for multiples within the same pattern. Thus, you can mention one or many countries in the same pattern.

Another way is to put country names you want to exclude separated with | sign, and enclose it with ( ) in Filter Pattern field. For example if you want to exclude traffic stats from China, Australia and India the  filter pattern will be(China|Australia|India) . And that’s all, now save this filter by clicking “Save Changes” button.

Kindly note that | and () are regular expressions, they have many uses, read about them at: Google’s Help Page

I am setting up analytics for my new projects and hence my future posts will around this topic. If you like to be informed about future posts, kindly subscribe to RSS of this blog. Also I have taken help and inspiration for this post from WasimAsif’s blog, thanks to him.

How to Create Your Own Brand Story?

To create a compelling brand story, you need to move beyond a simple cataloging of your product and benefits and answer questions about your purpose, your identity and what exactly your position is in the marketplace.
This begins with a series of questions that you ask internally:

• Who are we?
• Why do we do what we do?
• What do we care about?
• What’s our purpose?
• Why do we matter to the people that we do business with?
• What would we want people to say about us when they are satisfied?
• What would we want people to say about us when they are dissatisfied?
• What will we absolutely not do?
• What are we most proud of?

The internal questions are followed by an examination of the external environment:

• Who are our competitors?
• How are we different?
• How are we the same?
• What is their story?
• What do people say about them when they are satisfied?
• What do people say about them when they are dissatisfied?
• What are the things that our competitors do to tell their story?

The process of answering these questions is very clarifying, albeit fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. The stressful emotions stem from identifying those attributes about your organization and your product that you may have focused on as key differentiators that are,in the stark light of a honest assessment, of minimal value to your customer and minimally different in the marketplace. As you work through the process, however, you see more clearly the power of your true points of difference, and as you develop the story about your brand, you end up in a place that is more powerful and extendable than where you began.