One of my favourite projects I’ve been working on recently has been the RSPCA Think Pig campaign. I stopped eating meat when I was nine years old after reading about factory farming, and was vegetarian for 12 years (I’ve since failed, and am now pescatarian / attempting-to-be-positive-chooser). After going around ranting at people demanding that they stop eating meat due to the horrors of factory farming for a few years, and losing lots of friends in the process, I eventually realised that some people will always eat meat. So, if you’re going to eat meat, surely you should try and eat meat where the animals have been treated as well as possible?

That’s what Think Pig is about – raising awareness of the different farming methods, labelling on meat, and what they mean for pigs. There’s a great educational video and animation for the campaign, a downloadable shopping guide [PDF], and lots of other information on the Think Pig campaign site. Our contribution at NixonMcInnes was to create a Facebook Game and Facebook Page for the campaign. The game is a word game – pigs being so intelligent and all – where you get bonus points for answering facts about pigs and pig welfare correctly. People can then share these facts on their Facebook Wall, and ‘Like’ the Facebook Page to keep informed about the campaign progress and to discuss the issues around pig farming and pig welfare.

There’s been some lively debate on the Facebook Page about whether it’s helpful to promote higher welfare for pigs being farmed for meat, if you don’t agree with eating pigs in the first place. However, even though I don’t eat them myself, I’d rather people were well informed so they could make an educated choice about what (if any) kind of meat they eat.

Continuing to feature my delicious links on blog posts [I don’t like those automated services that just post a blog of your daily or weekly links – I wanted to group it better. I also don’t tend to save the obvious stuff to delicious, but tend to save things I’m not so likely to remember how to find via Google. So, in no particular order, here’s]… some slightly random/obscure analytics and analysis resources:

• Twitalyzer for Tracking Influence and Measuring Success in Twitter
• TweetReach: How Far Did Your Tweet Travel?
• Twit IQ: Twitter client apparently with analytics (but I can’t figure out how to see any decent ones…, but the rest is worth a look)
• Three Mashable articles about measurement and analytics and ROI: July 2008; October 2009; February 2010
• Analyze Words: Twitter Psychology. Also try TweetPsych
• Facebook Analytics: Part II – Vendor Solutions | John Lovett at Web Analytics Demystified
• Follow Finder by Google Looks at who you follow and suggests you other people to follow (Twitter appear to have copied this functionality now)
• Comparing Social Media Monitoring Platforms on Sentiment Analysis about Social Media Week NYC 10

I just made an audible noise of exclamation upon noticing Google Calendar has an updated Favicon

Anyone want to suggest their favourite random/obscure analytics or analysis articles/resources? Aside from the biggies (Google Analytics/Brandwatch/Radian6 etc.)?

I love looking at site analytics, and one of the most interesting and useful things to look at are search terms people use to find your site. So you can really look at what topics people are interested in. I had a look at how people come to my site via Google, grabbed the top 20 phrases and put them into Wordle. I didn’t weight the most commonly used ones against the 20th most commonly used one, but this still gives a good representation of the key themes people search for, that I write about.

Last week I did a little presentation on Digital Activism at the Brighton and Hove Socialist Party meeting. Here it is, all the slides are just images but all my notes are on the notes tab (if you view this presentation on Slideshare) and you can download the presentation too. The commentary is pretty much all taken from all over the internet, but I’ve referenced all my sources so hopefully nobody minds. You can download my notes here: digital activism PDF.

Thinking about giving presentations and public speaking lately… I’ve done conference speaking to groups of 80-100 marketers without much worry before, but put me in front of 10 people I really really respect and admire (like some awesome clients, proper geeks, or highly intellectual socialists) and I totally freak out. So yeah, my presentation didn’t really go that well due to nerves… I need to work on that!