Hi, I'm Margie Newman. I blog about public relations, social media, careers, productivity and geek stuff.

Thanks, Google. He was so obviously searching for me!

Oh, Google Analytics! Because of you, Feedburner and (the new love of my life) StatZen, I am able to obsess over site traffic, referrers, clicks, attention, subcribers and (rejoice!) how folks actually find FlackRabbit!

There are the obvious ways people get here. Like yesterday, when KamiChat re-tweeted my Twitter about her post. Within an hour or two, lots of new and fabulous eyeballs and RSS subscribers landed here (Thanks, sister! Welcome new folks!)

And then there is the way of the Google Keyword.

Here’s my favorite one:

"Picture of a complete dork"
“Picture of a complete dork”

Sure, some folks find FlackRabbit by Googling flack, public relations, Twitter is Useless and the like. But this guy took the road less traveled by. And you know what  they say about that. Welcome, kind Google searcher!

Second keyword runner up is:

"Margie Newman blog pictures Nashville"

No, this one isn’t funny at all, but it is interesting. No worries, Googler. You may find the great and powerful Picalicious here. But hurry! Only 29 days left to soak in the picture-a-day goodness.

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I heart/hate Feedburner

It seems like all the cool kids use Feedburner to track their blog subscribers and site traffic, so I thought I’d give it a shot. At first, I was in love! Four days later I’m livid.

The hubby had previously set me up with Google Analytics, which I adore but it doesn’t track feeds. Since Google just purchased Feedburner, I figured it would be intuitive and user friendly. Oh, honey. It was neither for me.

Last week I set up my free account, followed all the instructions and tried to complete it on my own, but had to have the hubby set up my FlackRabbit blog with the Feedburner widget thing.

It was working for a couple of days. It was so fun to track hits in real time and see how many subscribers were clicking on links in my feed. The “site visits” tracker never worked, but I was okay with that as long as my feeds were tracking.

And then today Feedburner wiped all my info from the chart. Gone.

I was already a little miffed at the time (2 to 4 hours) Feedburner takes to send my blog posts to Google Reader. Now they’ve erased my subcribers all together! Quality.

Of course, the fastest way to make me love you is to kill me with great customer service so maybe I’ll just … oh wait. That’s right. They don’t service anyone. No phone numbers, no email, no online form – just forums. Forums that NO ONE from Feedburner responds to. Classy.

So, FlackRabbit subscribers (Last time I checked there were about a dozen of you) could one of you you shoot me a note or comment if you have received this in a feed reader of any type? I can’t tell if my “zero” from Feedburner means you all left or if Feedburner just likes to make me cry.

Image representing Google Analytics as depicted in CrunchBase

Thanks! In the meantime, I’ll keep my feed running through Feedburner just to see if it will fix itself – and I’ll re-pledge my allegiance to Google Analytics.

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