The global trend towards digital socialization is around the corner and will make quite an impact on digital culture in 2010.

In 2009, we saw data portability (more simply described as logging onto “other” sites with your “Faebook” login.  We also saw people begin to understand what Twitter is good for.

We’re in a time now when countries such as India and China are quickly getting on board with social media.  Facebook’s explosive growth in the last few years was driven largely by non-US members.

What this means is that an unprecedented opportunity to globally extend communities is arriving.

The challenge will be bridging offline cultural gaps online, and the businesses that can enable this osmosis to the benefit of their brand will be the largest winners.

Another powerful social media trend will be around eReaders.  We are about to see an explosion in the adoption of eReaders that might very well outpace the iPod’s.  And as people replace their source of information from paper to digital, the advantages of digital will arrive as well.  There will be eReader apps, communities, and networks swirling around our sources of information in ways we have never seen.

And with game-changing changes in social media, we will also see businesses struggle to keep their social media policies up to date, flexible, yet risk-adverse.  As the global communities extend further, and digital reading begins quickly burning paper, the potential upside and downside will be a challenge for businesses to navigate.

e>

This post is meant to give you a high level view of how to best use GA.  Subsequent posts will tell you how to implement.

What I love about GA are the profiles.  Unlike other analytics packages, you can create a profile and use filters - this removes the needless exercise of “drilling down” to a particular channel to explore KPI’s- which, far too often (with other analytics packages) have a dead end.

I recommend setting up profiles for:

• All of your website (”all in”, as I call it)
• Organic
• PPC
• Mobile (my next post will be SOOOOO cool for you analytics geeks.  Get prepared for some advanced regular expressions stuff)
• Brand terms - most SEM campaigns report on performance without recognizing that brand terms are a “given”.  Create a filter to see how brand terms perform - this profile will also give you insight into the performance of channels like display, radio, television (awareness) perform - if you see a spike in brand terms, this is likely due to another channel that is otherwise difficult to track.
• Non-brand - create a profile that filters out brand terms so you can track the performance of your marketing efforts without the noise from other channels.
• Affiliate / partner - did you sign a partnership and want to see its performance?  Set up a filter.  Easy to report on.
• International - does your company report by region or by country? Align your marketing reporting with your company’s financial ones.  You can do this by country, region, or language.

That list is just a sample.  Come back for more details on HOW to set these up (particulary mobile!)