This is the first of an ongoing series of guest articles which explore web analytics and using Woopra. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact Lorelle at Woopra.com with your proposal.

By Charles McKeever

Building a social networking community is a lot of hard work. To really make it work and make people feel like there’s someone on the other side of their monitor you have to stay on top of welcoming new members, responding to discussions, being aware of new groups, commenting on new photos and videos, and responding to support requests.

It’s true that alerts for all these events can be programmed into a system, but that takes time and money. You could use some form of email system to track what’s going on in your community, but using email to respond to requests can be tedious. Unless you have to be in your email all day, it isn’t very productive and certainly not all that interactive.

What I’ve discovered is that Woopra provides a crazy simple solution to staying on top of activity in my social networking site with event notifications.

Using Woopra’s Event Notifications

Woopra’s event notifications let me set alerts for when certain events happen on my website. An alert can be a sound, a custom on screen message, or both.

Alerts can be set by visitor identification, pages and referrers, and system specifications. This makes it very simple to track when community members are online, when new forum discussions, new groups, new photos, new videos, and new comments are added.

Event notifications also gives a real-time way of knowing when someone comes from a particular country or city. If community members are sensitive to certain time zones then this can be extremely helpful, especially when trying to build a community with an international member base.

Woopra event notifications are extremely flexible and offer a great way to stay interactive on your websites.

Here are the events you can flag within Woopra’s event notifications:
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Woopra Sharing Access (WSA) is a new feature that we have just released for testing.

Woopra Sharing Access is very useful for those who want to show their website activity to their advertisers, other Woopra members, co-authors on multiple blogger sites, and more.

Where else can this feature be useful? What about communities or networks of blogs. We run Woopra on Woopra to track all our fans’ activities, and to help us put Woopra to the test. Most members of our development team have Woopra running on their personal sites, including John Pozadzides’s One Man’s Blog, my Elie El Khoury blog, and Lorelle’s blogs. We use each others’ blogs to test Woopra - especially before all our new members started appearing with the premature release of Woopra invitations, who are now helping us find all the bugs we missed among our few testing sites! Thank you.

The point is that we all work together, so we can now share our website traffic information with each other, since we are part of our own community and team. This isn’t a feature for everyone, but it is great for those who want and need to track more than one site and want to share their Woopra statistics. We’re sure you are going to come up with even more reasons to use Woopra Shared Access - and we expect you to share them with us.
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Woopra sets the time according to your time zone in relationship to GMT/UTC time.

To set your time zone in Woopra, log in to the Woopra website and go to Members > My Websites > Time Zone. Click on the number to change it.

The number is a postive (without the plus sign) or negative (with a minus sign), the number of your time zone relative to GMT/UTC.

To find out your time zone number, see Time Zone Converter and The World Clock – Time Zone Converter and search for the time zone in your area.

Some areas may be off by an hour due to recent changes in daylight savings time laws, so check your Woopra desktop client to ensure it is tracking the right time and change it accordingly.