How To Destroy Angels - The Band You May Have Missed This Year

How To Destroy Angels are one of my favourite bands from 2010 (I sense another post off the back of this), featuring Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, Mariqueen Maandig (his wife) and Atticus Ross (producer with Reznor on several previous projects including the soundtrack to The Social Network). 

They released a self-titled 6 track EP in 2010, and a video for ‘The Space in Between‘…

This video also made it into Pitchfork’s top 20 videos of the year. 

Go check them out on Myspace or Spotify

HOW TO Track Social Media Traffic in Google Analytics

 If you use Google Analytics, you’ve undoubtedly seen a report like this:

The problem is, there’s no breakdown of “social media” in this view of traffic sources, and with the dramatic rise of social media marketing, marketers need an easy way to segment and “see” this traffic separately from the rest of their referrers. We know it’s mixed in with “referring sites” and “direct traffic” but luckily, there’s a way to extract that data in just a few simple steps.

Step 1: Create a Custom Segment

Custom segments are the way to go for separating traffic into filter-able buckets for deeper analysis. GA makes this fairly painless:

From any of the “Traffic Sources” sections, just click the “Advanced Segments” in the upper-right hand corner and then the link to “Create a new advanced segment.”

Step 2: Add Social Sources

This is the most crucial part, and requires that you have a full list of the sites/words to include. Don’t just use the domain names or URLs of the most popular social sites, but instead, use clever “catch-all” words using the “source” condition, as shown below:

Make sure to continue adding “OR” statements, not “and” statements - the latter will require that both conditions are met vs. any one of the “ORs”. Here’s a few examples, but you can add as many as what’s relevant:

• twitter
• tweetdeck
• facebook
• linkedin
• youtube
• reddit
• digg
• delicious
• stumbleupon
• ycombinator
• flickr
• myspace
• hootsuite
• popurls
• wikipedia
• bitly

Depending on your niche, it might be valuable to run through your top 2-500 referring domains looking for any obvious matches. You could also refer to Wikipedia’s list of popular social sites.

Step 3: Test & Name Your Segment

In order to create a fully functional segment, you’ll want to test the logic you’ve created to be sure results are returning. Before you do that, though, GA requires naming your segment (e.g. “social media”):

Once it’s complete and working properly, click “save segment.” You’ll be returned to the prior screen with the segment ready to rumble.

Step 4: Filter Traffic by “Social Media”

Your new segment is ready to be applied. You can now filter social media exclusively or see it in comparison to other traffic sources on any report in GA. Just use the advanced segments drop-down and choose “social media” under the custom segments list like so:

Segmenting social traffic is useful for reporting, particularly to gauge value (if you have action tracking on commercial activities set up in GA, for example) and see growth/impact over time. But, there’s more you can learn than just raw traffic and conversions numbers.

Here’s some examples of reports to look at, along with the value from the data:

Once broken out, you can compare referring social media sites more easily. If you then compare this against traffic “opportunity” from these sites (using a combination of traffic data and gut check), you’ll be able to find which sites have the greatest chance to improve. 

This next chart compares search vs. social traffic over time:

If looking to evaluate progress and make comparisons, this view is fairly useful. You can see that the effort in social is paying off and also having an effect on search engine traffic too (through new links, citations, etc). 

Next, the level of engagement of social media visitors:

Naturally you can compare engagement as a result of social referrals to search or direct traffic, but it is also handy to watch as you make tweaks to your site to encourage greater engagement and click-through to see if those efforts are successful.

Last, let’s look at the pages social visitors see:

These are all potential opportunities to create more customized landing experiences based on the referrer path, and the report can also give me insight about what content I need to continue producing if I want to draw in more social traffic. 

If social media marketing is a focus of your organization, segmenting that traffic in reporting is critical to determining the value of your efforts and improving. So get into GA, segment, and start seeing your traffic for what it really is. 

Original post via SEOmoz

10 Hot New MySpace Profile Designs

Hats off to the early adopters of the new-look MySpace profiles - here are 10 of the best I’ve seen so far…

Outcast

Ashton Kutcher

Nicole Kidman

Lady Antebellum

Stand Up To Cancer

All That Remains

Rumer

Gemini Syndrome

Big Kid

Russell Brand

Bullet For My Valentine

Is This The Ultimate Music Chart?

New music aggregation service The Ultimate Chart integrates the most popular music from the likes of Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, VEVO, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL and many more.

Developed by LA-based media tracking and technology company BigChampagne, they claim to “collect more relevant information from more sources than anyone ever has” 

At time of writing the top 10 artists are:

1 - Eminem

2 - Taio Cruz

3 - Katy Perry

4 - Lady Gaga

5 - Taylor Swift

6 - The Arcade Fire

7 - Justin Bieber

8 - B.O.B.

9 - Usher

10 - Enrique Iglesias

Seems reasonable enough.

You can look at the top 100 artists and songs on their site -

http://www.ultimatechart.com

How To Design The New MySpace Music Artist Profiles

MySpace Music Artist Sites Design Guide

How 10 Social Media Sites Looked At Launch

Using the wayback machine internet archive, below is a selection of pioneering web 2.0 sites, and what they looked like at launch. Budding web entrepreneurs can take heart here, as the designs are a far cry from what we recognise now. But how they have grown….

Facebook

myspace

Youtube

Wikipedia

Twitter

Blogger

Digg

Tumblr

Flickr

Technorati

my new myspace

Recently I upgraded my myspace profile to the new designs, and was impressed with both the process and the end result.

Having been on myspace for nearly 5 years, I have seen it through many of the iterations of helping users with profile design for the less CSS-advanced like myself, and definitely feel the latest release was the smoothest yet.

The real-time customisation editor remains again, and allows you to choose your theme (basically the colours and/or background image) with not a HEX colour code chart in sight. However, I could have uploaded my own background and chosen a style, similar to Twitter’s customisation tool. Having chosen my theme, it was time to choose the layout where I opted for a two column design to house what I wanted to share with the world. Interestingly, you are also given the option to add a ‘marquee’ – basically a header image – a handy option for bands and artists.

The last part of the three-stage process is to choose the modules you want displayed on your profile and where, via  drag-and-drop functionality – neat.  Here you can add a whole host of content , but I opted to show my status (sync’d with Twitter), stream, music player, interests, friends, details & companies. I also added a custom HTML box to highlight the other networks I am on ad where to find me, but could be used for widgets, youtube videos, contact box or whatever you see fit (long as it doesn’t contain javascript which is blocked by the platform) – a really powerful module.

Then simply hit publish and its live.

Another big change to the architecture of profiles is the side navigation keeping visitors on your profile as they browse photos, playlists, videos, blogs and friends. And your profile design is carried over to each of these pages, instead of being taken off to a page deep in the photos area for example. It also provides standardisation to the site, allowing visitors to easily navigate from profile to profile. Also, all my content sits off my profile URL, which is great for improving the SEO to my profile and making me easier to find.

So it seems the hours of fun spent tweaking your myspace whilst learning HTML will become a thing of the past, as the site has become easier to use as a publisher and visitor.

To upgrade your profile head here