I wanna be positive about dating a girl who does research on the social web, but I can’t help but wonder how many nights together will go like this:

Me: “Baby I’m tired, you’ll never guess what I did today…”

Her: “Umm… you hit on some girl picking her nose, ate more than you should have and swam when you should have been finishing writing assignments ahead of their deadline.”

Whoa, whoa whoooa. Flag on the play. I don’t read YOUR diary. W-T-F-Girl!

I mean C’MON— some of the stuff I post publicly is PRIVATE.

-Dwight

After living here for four years you would think I’d learn to just expect the unexpected. Still, I was startled to see a group of twenty or so motorbikes barge their way into an intersection and cutting through the oncoming traffic, surely on the way to whatever summit I had seen other smaller packs of noisy moped riders speeding off to join.

They didn’t have the right away. They didn’t have the bigger vehicle. They didn’t have helmits.

They did have attitude. They did have numbers. They did have badass-bad hair.

Perhaps watching the riots all week has made me paranoid, but I realized I had witnessed a protests of sorts. Not as bold or malicious as the events in London— but with the same stroke of empowering defiance.

What lessons should Thailand be learning from London’s riots? Are they the same lessons the previous government failed to pick up on when the smoke cleared last year?

More importantly, how do you engage youth who feel recognized and powerful for the first time defying traffic in a motorcycle gang—- when you can’t engage a people who felt recognized and powerful for the first time when buildings went up in smoke?

If these are signs that an increasingly growing number of marginalized youth are crying out for acknowledgement, I hope we notice before it’s too late.

I created the presentation for a few reasons. First, one of the questions I had from the Oxfam was about how to allocate time for social media. So the presentation is kind written for people who want to convince the boss that social media is worthwhile by participating in it and showing results. Also, this presentation has been helpful for training my personal clients who want a better grasp of how they can participate or manage accounts on their own after completing the terms of their contract with me.

Use the full screen option to make sure all the text is readable.

Let me know if it’s helpful, if you have questions or if I missed something.

-Dwight

*WARNING: Incoming really nerdy twitter talk*

Ok, I’m going to try not to rant about what a hopeless cause it is to get info on a hashtag and share of the few helpful sites that are out there. That’s difficult because getting analytics on twitter (without paying $800 a month or more for tools like sysomos or radian6) has always been a problem.

Twitter Analytics Problems

Part of the problem is the wealth of info on twitter, even in it’s bite size packages. Tack on the fact that twitter doesn’t maintain a reservoir of those tweets that you can just come back and check and you’ve got problems figuring out what’s really going on with your brand or campaign.

You Can Back Up Some Data, So What?

Like I said before, there’s no reservoir of tweets. You can head over to Backupify and grab a free account to track the history of about 5 social media accounts. Still, however, they have not yet offered an option that would allow you to create a backup of a topical discussion. C’mon someone has to want to claim that idea, right? They already limit the data from the accounts you add, so how difficult would it be to add on a service like that also?

Managing Hashtags or Twitter Groups

The issues is looking at a hashtag and get an idea of the whole discussion, not only what’s said from one or two accounts I manage. This may be impossible to do in hindsight, but if you plan for this issue then a site like Twubs can help. This site just makes hashtags what really know them to be in other applications—grouped discussions. So this is especially helpful if you’re planning a twitter chat or you’re just starting to build a community around your hashtag.

Finally Something Semi-Helpful For Analyzing A Hashtag

Knowing everything is real time makes dealing with your hashtag a little less painful. It means if you are tracking a campaign then it needs to be constantly checked and recorded if possible. That may mean doing something as simple as taking screenshots or favoriting  notable tweets. Sites like Twazzup can look at a tag and give you helpful information available for the real-time data. You can go there and see influential users, highlighted messages, recent images, and term clouds. Making regular visits to a site like this one and recording some of the info in an excel sheet can be helpful for managing a long term campaign. (Note: If you just need to report back on the volume of tweets then you can keep checking a site like Hashtags, but there’s not much other helpful data there.)

Rendered on Crowdreel.com

Lastly the only site that impressed me in my search was one called Crowdreel. This site aggregates images which do have a tendency to stick around longer than other information on twitter (because they’re hosted by third party sites like Twitpic). I was about to go 2 months in time for twitter pictures— which is cool for a visual look at what’s happening on your tag, but also not helpful if you need to show data. Still it was cool to generate THIS from food photos.

There are very few helpful websites that you can use to get data for free. None of them completely does the job and they are often slow and unreliable when it comes to pulling data. Cross your fingers that this will be solved in the near future.

Finding what I need may cause me to take up yoga to channel some of the frustration. I’m playing around with Hootsuite and Sysomos later tonight, but should you really have to pay so much for a few ounces of useful info?

-Dwight

I’ve got my early copy of the new ebook, The Eating Thai Food Guide. Thought I’d give you a sneak peak of what’s to offer. The real thing launches this morning on our blog Eating Thai Food, which is dedicated to greasy food porn finds and getting people excited about sharing their food.

The gimmick for the book should be something like, “One hundred meals for the price of one,” because this thing is packed with instruction on how to really grub while you’re in Thailand and tons of high quality photos of different Thai food dishes. Here’s three features of the book I think you’ll enjoy.

Thai Food Meal Plans Ideal for Tourists/Expats

A lot of Thai food wasn’t meant to be eaten on it’s own (that’s a classic way to catch a great case of ‘wile bowels’). So you show up in Thailand and you sit down somewhere thinking you’re gonna order one dish and be happy—but often it doesn’t really work like that. Many of the dishes are meant to be eaten complimentary to each other in a family style setting where plates cover the table. This section gives you different meal sets to really dummy down this process for you. Of course you can mix and match the dishes after you figure what you like.

The “I’m a picky eater” list of important Thai phrases

If you’ve ever sat down at a Thai restaurant and asked for one thing and gotten another this will help you out. It’s almost like a language lesson with all the important phrases in their phonetic form. OR if you’re really lazy and just want to whip this out on your iPad or something it’s there in Thai so you can point or explain to the waitress and she’ll stop giving you that dumbfounded look.

Encyclopedia of Delicious Tasting Thai Food Menu Items

This isn’t everything Thai food has to offer, but is an extensive list that’s be categorized very well. Not only because Mark’s a friend, but I hope this ebook does well because it will open people’s eyes to how diverse Thai food (People don’t know that even a bowl of noodles can be ordered forty different ways– they will now!). The book also includes some shots and listings for some of my favorite places (i.e. the places we affectionately refer to as “Pumpkin Lady” and “Club Esso”).

What’s next?

The ebook will cost you about $7, but how badass would it be if there was an iPhone app? I have been telling Mark to jump on that, but I think he’ll see how well the book does first. I have a hunch that when you see how informative the book is, you’ll want all that info at your fingertips in an organized app too.

Grab the book and get going on eating your own epic Thai meals.

-Dwight

I will definitely be writing more about them, but just wanted to say I donated some space on No Leftovers to a banner. Does donating space on a website that only five of my friends read help? Yup. And like I said, it’s just a start. I will be helping spread the word about the good work their doing in some other places for sure. I’ll also be on twitter spreading the word about campaigns they’re doing like this online raffle where you can pledge tweets and be entered to win goodies.

Sorry to interrupt the nonsense you normally read here, but take a look and add a banner somewhere on your blog too.

-Dwight

Ok, so this tweet was actually written by @ktiu and tweeted from the wrong account in some sort of hilarious twitter phenoma-fuck-up. I think I spit a few poppy seeds from the bagel I was eating at the time. Fortunately, he immediately contacted before I started retweeting, responding, and getting people riled up (which I’m getting pretty good at, remember the party at Club Uncultured?).

More on this and other comments from the disgruntled Land of Farangery (a great term for expats in Thailand that I jacked from Tim Footman) soon… maybe.

-D

“My parents should have warned me about the consequences of casual facebook friending…”

Isnt this the bad guy from Kindergarten Cop? STRANGER!

Stranger!

One day you wakeup in the bed with forced birthday messages from people you don’t even know. Sinking regret. That’s how I feel now that I’ve realized I’ve spent the last two years being a facebook whore.

I’ve since repented. I now regularly jump in the krispy kreme line to give me the time I need to delete people I can’t really remember. This task requires so much research that I end up despondent about who my real friends are (in a way that donuts can’t really medicate once I’m to the front of the line).

Today I’m also instituting a moratorium on new people. I can’t handle the people I have on there now. You may want to do the same and remember to free yourself of some the applications that have access to most of your information (i.e. Your Bitch For the Day).

WTH guys— Stalk me on twitter like normal people.

-D