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Already regional newspapers in the US have taken the service up from the Daily Californian to The Stanford Daily and it’s something UK regional newspapers should be looking into and other content providers that may not have the resources or time to creating an app from scratch but want to distribute their content on the iPhone.

Compared to other services I’ve seen that can build you an app this looks the quickest way of getting one together for your website or blog and onto the Apple store. One thing we have been looking at for our titles at Redactive Media is producing iPhone apps and iSites is a service I’ll be testing out shortly to create one so will report back on the process next week.

You may have 60,000 followers on Twitter but if this isn’t resulting in increasing your traffic you need to see why. I’ll be looking at that in part two but for now I’m going to show you how you can set up Google Analytics to work for you and track in one place how your social media is performing in relation to your other traffic sources – direct, search and other referring sites.

First thing to do once logged into your Google Analytics account is click on ‘Advanced Segments’ and add new segment.

Under ‘traffic sources’ you need to drag the button for ’source’ to the dimension or metric space. Change condition to ‘Matches regular expression’ then in the box next to it you want to add in all the Social Media you use like Twitter and Linked etc. separating each one like this twitter|facebook|linkedin. Once that’s done, name it and save it and your social media tracking is complete.

To view this in action head to your visitors overview. In the right hand corner above the graphs you can see the advance segments option. You can either tick your new customised segment and see just your visitors and page views received from social media or by ticking all visits as well you can see how this compares to the total traffic figures for the site.

Before setting this segment up you would have had to go to referring sites and look for each of the social media networks you’ve used but now you can get one figure for all those networks combined. By clicking traffic sources you can compare this with other referring sites, traffic received from search and what comes in directly, giving you a complete picture of your social media campaign performance.

(UPDATE)

Since publishing this post The Manchester Evening News report on the story has confirmed that United’s neighbours and rivals Manchester City have also advised their players not to set up social networking pages.

Manchester United football club have banned their players from maintaining social network profiles on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitter accounts held by players Darren Fletcher, Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs were all removed, as revealed by football blog EPL Talk. Ryan Giggs also had content removed from his Facebook page as well as team mate Rio Ferdinand.

The football club may have done this to make sure traffic that they feel should be coming to their website isn’t aimed elsewhere and missing out on revenue opportunities.  Although there are literally thousands of fan created sites around out of their control so it seems that they are doing this to protect themselves from any comments from their players getting them in trouble as has already happened in the sporting world.

With many incidents causing teams to punish or ban permanently players from using social networking sites this won’t be the last time professional sports and social media will collide. Read the rest for my favourite incidents where sports teams have put their foot down over social networking or a star player has landed himself in a bit of bother.

Darren Bent is probably the best example of how Twitter has allowed football fans to gain a closer insight into a footballers life that regular interviews don’t and it even secured him a move away from his old club Tottenham Hotspur when his move to Sunderland hit a snag. His outburst about chairman Daniel Levy had to be deleted but with the press reaction and subsequent completion of the move Twitter had entered the sporting mainstream conscience.

American football player Antonio Cromartie was fined $2,500 for complaining about the team meals the players were served.

Aussie cricketer Phillip Hughes revealed he’d been dropped for the third test during the Ashes series last year in England.

And finally, want away footballers beware as it doesn’t always work out like it did for Darren Bent as Crystal Palace youngster Ashley-Paul Robinson found out when he revealed he was having trials with Fulham on his Facebook page, not realising the papers would soon pick up on this story. He was subsequently told by Crystal Palace to look elsewhere and now plays for Dulwich Hamlet, many leagues below that of either Palace or Fulham.

With the national press using Twitter more and more to source stories, professional sports team may start clamping down on their players using social networking, but I like many others hope this won’t stop us getting an insight into a sport stars world.

Startups cash in on Twitter with pay-per-tweet from the San Franscisco Chronicle

How small newspapers can make money from Twitter from Econsultancy

The requirement from the client was to increase People Management’s presence in Google, to bring in more referrals from the search engine and also to use SEO and other traffic building techniques to increase the visitors to the website.

You can read about the work on the People Management project page.

After finally succumbing to the dark side and getting the iphone, I’ve been excited about what apps I’m going to get.  An important one being which news apps I’m going to get for my on the move intake of what’s going on in the world.  I found this excellent resource from the Online Journalism Blog about ‘iphone News Apps Compared’ which covers news sources from both sides of the Atlantic.

For me personally, I’ll definitely be taking up the Guardian app which has the option to view the latest and trending stories or if you prefer, you can still move through the papers usual sections.  As you would expect with such a great digital outlook at The Guardian they’re at the forefront of papers immersing themselves in the capabilities of the iphone and this slick app is essential for news on the move – a one off charge at just over two quid make this a bargain.

Over the pond then it’s the New York Times which I’ll be adding for an American slant to my news.  While holidaying in New York I always picked up a hard copy from a newsstand  in the morning which seemed in part to this romanticism view I had of what it would be like working in the big apple some day and joining the throng of workers at sun rise as they picked up their copy and rushed to work with a coffee and bagel…sometimes I even got round to reading the thing!  I still go on their website every now again and although this app doesn’t bring anything new to the table like the Guardian, at no cost you can’t go wrong.

I think three news apps will be enough for me right now until a ‘another manager has been sacked breaking news app’ is developed for my football team QPR so I’ve gone for CNN.  With a custom search and GPS location based content, a hotel room TV now won’t be the only place I get my fix of CNN from.  Sadly the location based content only works in the US but they do have a nice tool to upload your own content to their citizen journalism page “iReport”.

I find time less forgiving these days to pick up a paper on the jaunt into work and have a decent read so these well constructed news apps will make sure I’m armed and ready to join in any early talk of the latest news when I get in the office.  Have you tried any news apps so far that you would recommended or are you already using any of the above?  Please leave a comment below.