My second post for OxonDigital:

…If you don’t know the answer to this question then you’re doing it wrong!

At the last OxonDigital meetup I was happy to be on the first Q&A panel to talk about social media. There were some excellent questions including one about monitoring that I thought deserved further attention. I must begin with an apology because I don’t remember who actually asked the question on the night. If it was you let me know in the comments 😉 You asked what options were available for a small operator to monitor for mentions of your business or yourself online.

The first question – Why?

Before I get too deep into the tools I think it’s important to take a step back. First you must answer the question ‘why?’ Why do you want to monitor online communication about you or your brand? I hope no one is thinking ‘because so-and-so told me to!’ There is no absolute right answer but there are few wrong answers.

My first post for OxonDigital:

As this is my first post for Oxon Digital (Hi, *wave*) I’ve decided to keep it light and simple, showcasing some of the things that have caught my eye recently in the world of social media. These range from social campaigns being run by global companies to the smallest spark of a great idea.

For today, we will stick to things on Facebook. In future posts I will move out into the scary world beyond Facebook and look at some of the up and coming networks out there and maybe some of the dying ones.

I came across an interesting site whilst perusing the internet last night: formspring.me.

The premise of the site is simple, answer questions, but in a different way to Yahoo Answers. Here you answer questions which people have directly asked of you. I see potentially here for corporate use as well as personal, I’m just having mine as a bit of fun. So, if you have any burning questions to ask me fire away!

[Disclaimer: I do not promise to answer truthfully.]

“Google give us a wave, Google Google give us a wave….

WAAAAYYYY”

I can see it now being sung, football hooligan style at all IT conventions across the globe. Back to the point, I have Wave now (thanks to Sylvia), shout if you want my ID, or drop me yours. IF I know you I might even add you as a contact.

What an exciting afternoon, with Twitter down, Facebook struggling and Flickr hiccupping. Turns out that Twitter was being DDos’ed… no idea on Facebook or Flickr.

What more could you want from a day? Begs the question why the hell I’m writing about this…

Some Twitter coverage here on their blog, their status blog and on Wired. Facebook stuff can be read about on Mashable and I think I made up the rest.

Ciao.

You may have been wondering what my tweets were about that look a little strange with random first words and referencing http://tinyurl.com/alcopopular3. Well I shall explain, of course if you’ve been to that URL already then you will know something about it, but this is for those who haven’t bothered.

Basically Alcopopular3 is the latest compilation from Alcopop records, this is slightly different though, its only available as a bottle or mp3’s. Brilliant!

Anyway, the tweets, I got exclusive access to the tracks, a perk of knowing Jakkychamp, and each day for the next two weeks I will be reviewing a track in one tweet. The first word is the band name. So yeah keep an eye out and see what you think, hopefully I will drive some sales – LOL.

Proud to have received a special mention already!

Peace.

Mashed in-between all the news reports of Swine Flu killing the entire world, I heard a story on the radio this morning about Fiji and the media censorship going on there. From a little research it doesn’t appear to be a new story so I won’t go into too much detail. By all accounts the new chief has put restrictions on the Fijian media, kicked out all foreign journo’s and shut down the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio transmitters – source: Brisbane Times and ABC Australia.

Working in the word of mouth world, censorship is an issue which comes up from time to time, so the issues resonated some what.

My favourite part of this story is the Fiji Daily Posts’ daily posts… as they have also been censored and are not allowed to cover what is really going on, they have started writing about extremely interesting topics like paing drying, a man getting on a bus and most excitingly, about breakfast.

Weird times.

Have been thinking about this for a few days, with the ways my content is cross pollinated across a number of different sites there are a number of ways readers can comment.

This is definitely the worst thing I have ever read on Mashable! Ok maybe worst is a little harsh. I am a big fan of Mashable and think that a lot of the insight there is great and of huge use to the readers. However this isn’t the case for this article, I have read some of Dan Zarrella’s other stuff and I thought it was good, but this piece co-authored by Alison Driscoll is weak.

I have just read this article by Valerie Stevens. I cannot pass comment on the quality of paid content, because I never pay for content. However moving swiftly onto Sheree Zielke’s thoughts on writing quality, personally I couldn’t give a monkeys what a professional writer thinks of my grammar, tone, context and for the record I like rambling on in long sentences which don’t go anywhere.

I have no aspirations or misconceptions that I am a quality writer, but who’s complaining? Anyone? Other than Sheree of course. If you think I need to sort out what I’m writing let me, so I can ignore you and go on as I am. 😀