Online Committee Report, ISIT 2013

Report of the Online Committee

Summary

The website has been running consistently and smoothly since February. The issue experienced in February has been fixed by migrating to an Apache we server, and no problems have been reported since. A security patch was released in June and the website has been updated.
 
The main topics reported in this brief report include 
  • a discussion on how to increase the society's visibility on social media
  • analytics
A more comprehensive report on ongoing other initiatives (online newsletter, discussion of papers, syndication of table of contents of transactions) will be provided during the next meeting at ITW 2013.
 

Social media

Following the SRC's recommendation, the Online Committee has started exploring various ways of expanding its use of social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, etc.). The recent Shannon centenary stamp initiative has shown the limit of our current system, as we are missing an easy way for people to disseminate information by sharing, or re-tweeting news items. A key concern of the Online Committee is to keep the management of multiple social media as simple as possible, e.g. by posting a news item only once and having it propagate automatically to all social media. Current discussions with Six Feet Up focus on the integration of existing software tools to integrate all social media, e.g.  http://twitterfeed.com/  or  https://hootsuite.com/ .
 
The Online Committee will also try to obtain feedback from other societies that have made the move to social media. In particular, ComSoc seems to make heavy use of social media. 

Analytics

The last five months of web traffic remain stable with over 300 visits/day. The traffic comes for 62% from search engines, 15% from direct traffic, and 20% from referring sites. 

Statistic 2/3/2013-7/7/2013 9/2/2012-2/3/2013
Visits 45,022 ( 23,061 unique) 39,197 ( 20,882 unique)
Pageviews 114,396  98,248
Pages/Visit 2.54 2.51
Bounce Rate 60% 63%
Avg. Time 00:02:12 00:02:14
New Visits 47% 48%

All of the above statistics may be self explanatory except for  bounce rate , which is the percentage of single-page visits. 

 

The following table shows the top 5 page views (not including the main page) of the website for the period 2/3/2013 to 7/7/2013.
 
Page name Pageviews 
european school 2013 3,619
north american school 2,814
upcoming conferences 1,964
Shannon centenary US postal stamp initiative 1,717
IT paper award 1,669

The following table shows the top 10 countries from which visit originates  for the period 2/3/2013 to 7/7/2013
Country Visits
 United States 15,662 
 India 3,032 
China  2,342 
Germany  1,905 
Canada  1,763 
France  1,718 
Iran 1,378 
Greece 1,155 
UK  1,141 
Japan  861 
The following table shows the top ten countries visiting the website for the period 2/3/2013 to 7/7/2013.