Making Sense of the Gobbledygook

(First things first--who ever thought they'd have to type out the word "goobledygook"? I had to google how to spell it!)

(Er, I mean... First things first... Happy New Year everyone!)

I taught a class yesterday all about getting started with Social Media. This is a topic that Jordan and I had a lot of fun speaking about at the 2009 Alliance for Nonprofit Management Annual Conference, but this was the first time I got to teach it as an online class, which has the marked benefit of being able to click away from the powerpoint presentation, and actually fool around on the web to give realtime, live examples of what we're talking about. I was demonstrating how hashtags work on twitter (and you know that's my THANG) when one of the students stopped me and said,

"Claire, just what does all that goobledygook mean?"

She was refering to this tweet, which was at the top of the list of recent tweets using the #10ntc hashtag.

Now, I'll admit, even to someone who's been around twitter a bit might be taken aback by that tweet for a minute or two--it's an awful lot of symbols and characters and acronyms considering it's less than 140 characters. So we broke it down in the class, and now I'll break it down for you.

First, we have the name and icon for the twitter user who initially tweeted, ImmunizeCOKids. (Go nonprofit orgs on twitter! Yeah!) ImmunizeCOKids is retweeting (or RT) something that they saw twitter user @SAAFdn say. Anytime you see an @ in front of a name, it's referring to another twitter user. But SAAFdn's tweet was also a retweet of something yet another twitter user, @CDEgger, said. The main content of @CDEgger's original tweet was "2010 Nonprofit Technology Conf. scholarship applications are open" However, when she tweeted that she added a couple of pieces of information. First, the hashtag, #10ntc (I don't have to explain what a hashtag is here, do I?) allows people to easily search and find other tweets with related content, as well as tag her tweet as something useful for people searching for tweets related to the 2010 NTC. There is a bit.ly link to the scholarship application, which is a shortened link to allow all the information included in a single tweet to fit in less than 140 characters. Finally, there's a reference to @lozz, another twitter user. My guess in this case is that @CDEgger thought @lozz would be interested in the information, and so to make sure she saw it, included her handle.

So there you have it. Goobledygook deciphered! If you're left wanting more, you're in luck. Our next "Getting Started With Social Media" class is scheduled for early March, and currently open for registration. Or if you don't want to wait quite that long, check out one of our other classes. And the next time you see a tweet full of RTs and and @s and #s, take a deep breath, and jump in.

Posted by Claire Smith on January 13, 2010 at 03:17 pm EST

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