I’m writing on behalf of the RSPCA, raising awareness of its urgent campaign to protect the welfare of UK meat chickens.

Right now, the government is considering new EU legislation that may increase the number of chickens allowed in rearing sheds. Even at current minimum standards, each bird is given less space than a sheet of A4. It’s hard to walk or even flap their wings. But this legislation would allow yet more birds to be squashed in, cutting that space by almost a quarter.

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sourced by bethgranter

The RSPCA are asking people to petition Jim Fitzpatrick, Minister for Animal welfare, to make the right choice for UK chickens and quash the squash, by sending an email via the Quash the Squash website. Mr Fitzpatrick’s decision is imminent and we want 15,000 letters to be sent before he makes his decision.

The RSPCA have also created a short film called Irritating Chicken to highlight the plight of broiler (meat) chickens’ if EU legislation on living conditions is brought into force in the UK. The purpose of the stunt was to invade people’s personal space to make them feel what is like being squashed into a chicken shed.

Qdos I have only seen used for individuals and not for brands or organisations, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for them, so I’ve been using it to assess changes in Compassion’s online reputation over time.  It’s quite fun to see who you’re more famous than, and it provides a nice ’splodge’ diagram of how active, unique and popular you are and how much impact what you say has.  It doesn’t work for organisation’s Facebook Pages though.

HowSociable allows you to subscribe to monthly updates and compares you against famous brands like Coca Cola who are given a rank of 1000, so your number is in comparison to that.

Twitter Grader grades you against other Twitter users so you get a score depending on how much you tweet, how many followers you have and how many people you’re following.  They’ve also just launched Facebook Grader where you can get a score for how famous you are on Facebook.  Myself, I do better on Twitter.

Others I’m using but didn’t have time to talk about include Social Mention, Samepoint and Twitterholic.   Twitterholic is great because you get a graph over time of how many followers you had each day, so if it suddenly drops you can go and check what you said that offended everyone.  Mine dropped off quite significantly one day when I called Chris Rock a racist, but I reckon Twitter had just done a sweep of spam accounts and deleted a bunch of people.

I also showed how I’ve created an iGoogle ‘dashboard’ of RSS feeds made up from search results from a number of the above social media conversation search engines, in order to easily track the latest thing that has been said about the organisation, to see if there’s any opportunity to join that conversation.  On that there’s also a Dipity timeline of YouTube videos.

Mashable did an article about how to track influential voices using Buzzgain (apparently my face came up as influential about something or other!  I’m very proud – having my face on Mashable is the Social Media equivalent of being on the cover of Time Out) so I need to check that out too.  There’s also a bunch of Twitter directories which I use to find the right people for Compassion to follow, some of which are covered by Mashable this week too, for example Twellow.  Another Twitter tools I’ve used to find the right people to follow is MrTweet, and I’m using Twitterfeed to automatically feed our Flickr photostream RSS, Flickr group RSS, and YouTube RSS in to Twitter.  It’s important not to rely on auto feeds though or your Twitter stream will be boring and nobody will follow you back.

OK, so here’s the videos of me doing my thing.  Sorry for the crappy sound quality and it was filmed on a tiny digital camera but you get the idea! I start about six minutes in…

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a0NN7SocF9U]

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Qda_2XQBhWY]

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=77pL5Br3cXQ]

Compassion in World Farming features in tonight’s programme and has been instrumental in helping Hugh launch his campaign to give chickens a better life. You might remember that in June we helped to raise the £86,600 demanded by Tesco to bring Hugh’s resolution to their AGM, and provided scientific research and investigative footage to validate Hugh’s argument.

We also campaigned for consumers to raise their concerns with Tesco and placed adverts in national newspapers to encourage shareholders to support the resolution. Since then, we’ve been working together with Hugh encouraging the food industry to put high welfare standards at the top of their agenda.

Tesco fought our campaign all the way and the resolution was defeated, but following the failure of 20 per cent of shareholders to back the company’s position – an unusually strong protest at a FTSE 100 AGM – Tesco began talks on chicken welfare. Watch tonight to find out more…

Their ad was quite upsetting for me to watch, as it loops constantly and the poor dog just doesn’t stop pacing!  Placement on a page where I’m trying to read an article about the Google phone made me not even get to the end of the article because it was so disturbing seeing this ad.  Yeah of course I know it’s not real and the dog probably only did that walk once or twice, but nevertheless it is the visual effect of it that affected me.