How do our audiences use digital media?

This is Audiences London’s burning question… we want to get to the bottom of what works and for whom.

We’re keen to develop our resources and help organisations decide where to put their investment, what tools/content engage audiences the most, and how to evaluate which digital media to use when… So, for starters we’ve thrown down the gauntlet for the AmbITion Roadshow and Art of Digital Events (16/17 July) delegates to let us know. But we’re open to all comers to comment and guide our investigations…

Digital bums on seats?

One of my favourite reads recently, a quote from Hannah Nicklin’s blog, a fellow delegate at Shift Happens this week:

A theatre company operating now, with no involvement in social media, is like a painter having no involvement with the colour blue. ‘But how does this translate to bums on seats’

In fact this is taken a little out of context with the rest of the post, so forgive me. The eloquent painter sentence is Hannah’s own view, where as the ‘bums on seats’ comment is the phrase she’s arguing should be abolished when it comes to discussing social media. An excellent blog post, do have a read.

Oh, and I posted a (rather long) comment in reply which you can read here, defending the people who want to know the ROI of social media at the moment. Although I’m one who doesn’t need the numbers, I’m sold, I understand why some do, and I think it’s ok to ask.

Are you using Google Analytics?

We’ve been advocating the use of Google Analytics for some time now. Primarily because it’s free, readily accessible to everyone, and as such can be used as a control to accurately benchmark different websites. Your website may have an inbuilt web statistics tool (something that tells you how many people have visited your site, when, how often, from where etc…), but I can almost guarantee that it will use different measurements to record your site activity to someone else’s webstats.

So as we’ve been testing out our digital benchmarking project on a few willing guinea pigs, it’s been much easier to gather data from each site through GA. And it has much more capability than most webstats plug ins, certainly more than the one that our website has. And in today’s newsletter from our very own web developers, they’re reccomending GA and providing a few tips on how to use it to produce measurable results which you can read here. I think they’re doing the right thing in taking this angle rather than trying to improve their own web stats tool. Especially as Google was today announced as the first brand to cross the $100 billion value mark. Scary, but let’s reap the rewards!

Try Google Analytics now.