A Kentucky university is aggressively fighting parody and criticism of school officials and policies on Twitter and other social media sites, which advocates and students say is an attempt to silence any negative comments.

Western Kentucky University’s president has used Facebook to lecture students about social networking etiquette, and officials persuaded Twitter to briefly shut down a parody account dripping with sarcasm and criticism with posts marked “(hash)wku.” Officials deny charges of censorship, but observers say the school appears to have immersed itself in social media deeper than many others around the country.

Any new policy also raises the question of whether a school could limit what students post when they’re off campus and not using school equipment. Many schools have anti-cyberbullying policies, but most of those apply only to school-owned servers and equipment.
Despite whether you favor WKU’s policy, the issue is that social media can be used to manipulate and control your brand. Social media allows you to aggressively control and respond to information being shared about your company.

Performing data analysis requires understanding what your company defines as success before you can even start to figure out which reports and metrics to use. The best place to begin is to think about why you have a website, what you’re trying to achieve (lead generation, site engagement, sales, et cetera), and how those objectives map to specific metrics in Google Analytics. For example, if you have an ecommerce website, you might want to track which types of users purchased and which types of users didn’t purchase. If you have a site with lots of content, you might want to understand where users came from before watching a video (e.g., were they referred by a blog post, or did they click on a paid search ad?), or you might be interested in how users moved through your site before getting to a certain page.

You created your website with the hope that users would come and visit. Even if you aren’t selling anything, you can use Google Analytics to help you dive deeper into your site performance and learn where your users might be having trouble. This means analyzing conversion. A “conversion” isn’t just a sale — it’s about all of the reasons why your site exists; it’s any action you want your visitors to take based on your business objectives.
Analyzing your company’s data is related to your business objectives and goals.

Apple may have made tablets trendy but Amazon is making them popular and affordable. Strong demand for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet and the continued popularity of Kindle eReaders lead to the retail giant’s best-ever Black Friday for the Kindle family of products. Amazon on Monday announced that sales of Kindle devices on Black Friday quadrupled last year’s sales, setting a new record. The company reported that it sold millions of new Kindle eReaders and Kindle Fire tablets combined before the Black Friday shopping weekend began. ”Even before the busy holiday shopping weekend, we’d already sold millions of the new Kindle family and Kindle Fire was the bestselling product across all of Amazon.com,” said Amazon VP Dave Limp in a statement. “Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle family – customers purchased 4X as many Kindle devices as they did last Black Friday – and last year was a great year. In addition, we’re seeing a lot of customers buying multiple Kindles – one for themselves and others as gifts – we expect this trend to continue on Cyber Monday and through the holiday shopping season.” Amazon also noted that the Kindle Fire tablet has now been Amazon’s best-selling product for eight weeks running.