#Hash-whaties? Joining a world-wide conversation

The topic of #hashtags is a tricky one to write on, because either you know about hashtags already, in which case you'll say, "pshaw, hashtags, I know all about you!" and move smugly on to the next blog post of the day, or you're still sitting there, staring at your screen, thinking "hash-whaties? WHAT-tags?" and you too, will move quickly on to another blog post.

I implore both of you to not to leave just yet, especially if you're interested in branding yourself, raising awareness, publicizing an event or program, and even creating communities in the social media universe.

Okay, a two-sentence rundown for the people who still don't know what hashtags are. A hashtag is a tag used on Twitter that begins with a pound sign or hash: #. The reason for adding the # in front of the #hashtag is that when you click on a hashtag in a tweet, you're taken to realtime search results of all other tweets that use that hashtag. It's as if you can listen in on a conversation that people are having from all over the world.

Think about it. If you want to start a conversation, all you have to do is come up with a hashtag. If you want to join a conversation, all you have to do is find a hashtag. It can be anything from the name of the event, to a phrase that you want to focus on. The important thing to do is to make it easy enough to use and remember, and then disperse it as much as possible. Because hashtags are only as useful as the number of people using them.

Realworld example time:

If you read Antharia's ch@tter regularly, you may have read my recent blog post called NaNoWriMo takes over the Social Media 'verse so I won't re-hash the awesomeness that is NaNoWriMo (though sadly, I only have 4300 words written so far this year). Here we have an example of a hashtag-- #nanowrimo--that is utilized largely by the community of participants rather than by the organizers of the event itself. The main #nanowrimo hashtag may lead you to tweets that contain anything from excerpts of novels in progress to word counts, to the hopeless despair of those who fear they won't be able to write their remaining 45700 words in the week left of the month. (Okay, that last would be, well, me.)

And if you're quick, you might catch the last lingering tweets using the #nowd hashtag, which stands for "Night of Writing Dangerously" a one night fundraising event that takes place during the larger one-month phenonemon that is NaNoWriMo. Using this hashtag, people could tweet before the event to garner support (both moral and financial), then share their experience of the event during it, both with the other participants who were physically taking part, as well as with those who were not able to attend physically. Rather than having to follow the twitter streams of 10, 20, or more participants for the night, someone could follow all the conversations, comments, jokes, and experience, in real-time, simply by watching the single hashtag. As my favorite sports network says, "It's not at all like being there!" (but it's the next best thing.)

Furthermore, a tweet using both the #nanowrimo hashtag and the #nowd hashtag could lead someone who knew about one and not the other to find out more about about a topic related to one they were already interested in with a single click of the mouse.

Another example for those of you in the non-profit technology universe would be NTEN's 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. Though the NTC isn't until April 2010, you can already start to find tweets using the #10NTC hashtag, a full 6 months in advance of the event itself. By watching that hashtag over the next 6 months, both the organizers and the participants will be able to start, follow, and shape conversations about the event. By the time April comes, people will already be engaged--because there's been an easy way to follow all the conversations that have led up to the event.

So next time you tweet, think about it--are there any conversations that you want to be a part of? And if so, what's your hashtag?

And finally, in closing, I'm going to leave you with the following youtube video of a (short, funny) presentation about using hashtags by Baratunde Thurston, a video that I only found by clicking on--you guessed it--the #hashtag hashtag.

Posted by Claire Smith on November 19, 2009 at 05:41 pm EST

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