Right now I’m doing my best to master Google Analytics, which is quickly becoming more and more robust, especially for social media reporting. Unlike Facebook, where the old reporting platform can sometimes provide a clearer picture than the “improved” one (at least in my experience), Google Analytics is just getting better.

For so long, gathering metrics on social media required a lot of grunt work — I remember actually counting tweets daily to measure the effectiveness of a huge national brand launch. The dream of actual social analytics is starting to come true, and there are plenty of vendors lining up to be the best, and I’m looking forward to those conversations.

But I also want to be able to do as much of this as I can on my own; not just read the generated reports. Today I downloaded the preview copies of a couple of books on iTunes, and I’ll keep posting as I learn.

The goal is to set up the best reporting I can do on my own for this particular blog, and to share the learnings. Data transparency. It’s okay, you can laugh.