Google is scary

Greetings again from China.  I am back after a 10 day stint in the US, and thoroughly exhausted from a nice little roadtrip up and down the Northeast corridor.  Thank you to everyone who let me crash on their couches and futons, it was a great time seeing everyone if only for a couple nights.  

Everything has been moving fast over here, and after a quick debriefing I was back in Hong Kong the morning after I arrived.  I soon found myself in a chair at HSBC, reviewing requisite forms and putting my overly practiced John Hancock on said pieces of paper.  I must admit, there is something very romantic about signing off on your first business account and getting those little plastic cards put into your hand.  I need to constantly remind myself that I have yet to receive a single cent, and that none of this is real until that first check is made out to us.  But I lapsed for a few minutes to enjoy the feeling, and as a group, we felt that was completely appropriate.  

 The boys on the ground have been busy with our web marketing and our classes are already filling up with potential students.  Interest from the alma mater is less than stellar but after some very productive meetings with Trinity's administration, next summer holds some real exciting potential.  I look forward to continue the dialogue with Career Services and the International Programs department and make some real progress in advancing both my program and helping students get a worthwhile experience.  

Back to the web marketing and technology side:  Google Tracker is amazing, and perhaps our newest time wasting tool.  Much like Facebook and all the gossip websites keep people busy looking up obscure nonsense and random trivia on old friends, Google Tracker for our website has given us a glorious wealth of information on those people visiting our website.  This afternoon we managed to spend over an hour digging through not only how many hits we're getting but what states/countries/regions they are coming from, how long visitors are staying on the page, and which pages they're looking at.  Sounds creepy?  It sure is, and it makes you wonder how much Google really knows.  It is such a powerful entity on the web, and is so valuable because of its ability to track this kind of information.  This stuff is the gold to marketers, and it really sets you in perspective when you think of how hard people are pushing to get into Facebook.  The information on Facebook is perhaps the holy grail for marketers.  I'll go into length on that statement when it seems more appropriate (when it gets really boring here for a couple days)