#Hashtag - You're It!

Guest post from Kelly Joffe of Cliff Ross Design

Hashtags: we know that you have seen them all over the place, and maybe you use them yourself. They have played a significant role on Twitter and now they are starting to pop up all over Facebook. But what does it really mean to use a hashtag – what purpose does it serve? Far beyond #BeiberFever, hashtags are now playing an important role in online branding  for companies.

Hashtags originated as a conversation creator for specific topics on Twitter. Lets say someone was at the beach, enjoying the day with their family and posted a Tweet about it. If they used the hashtag #family or #BeachDay, it would start or join a conversation that has already been created about those topics. So when the hashtag is clicked on, you can view all the other “tweets” about that subject. Maybe other people in your area are enjoying a day at the beach with their families. Hashtags are just another way to connect people who are doing or talking about similar things. Now Facebook is utilizing hashtags as an additional way for people to connect and share information.

Recently we’ve been seeing how hashtags can play a key role in promoting a brand online. Similar to the way people use hashtags to connect with one another, hashtags can be used as a way to connect people to a brand. Lets use Red Lobster as an example. If someone is out to eat at Red Lobster and they post a status or Tweet about being there, they could use #RedLobster in their post. Now anytime #RedLobster is searched, everyone who has made a post about it will show up. This starts to create a buzz around a brand, and becomes a way for people to connect to the brand and help share the brand’s message.

Brands can also develop their own hashtags that are specific to their business. For example, McDonalds uses the hashtag #ImLovinIt – this is their brand slogan, which they have also developed into a hashtag. Now anytime that hasgtag is used, it’s associated with the McDonalds brand.

Social Media is a landscape that is constantly changing and evolving. If you are going to take part in this social environment – it’s important to stay current with the trends. Social Media will play a crucial role in business marketing in the future, just as it’s starting to do now. Hashtags aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, but how we use them will certainly evolve over time.

Here at Cliff Ross, our job is to keep up with the changing landscape that is Social Media. We are happy to answer any questions and help guide your business through the world of social media marketing. Give us a call at 610-829-1333.

Guest post from Kelly Joffe of Cliff Ross Design

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Twittering Librarians Confront Hashtagging

Cataloging used to be the preserve of a special breed of librarians, but in the Web 2.0 era, cataloging, in the form of "tagging" has been opened up to the masses. With the advent of Twitter, this sort of tagging, which used to be tucked away in metadata fields, has injected itself into people's everyday stream of text. So it's interesting to see what happens when librarians, all of whom should have at least a bit of training in the application of subject headings, are presented with the task of hashtagging their Tweets. That's exactly what happened thes past weekend when 28,000 people attended the Annual Meeting of the American Library Association (ALA) in Chicago. Over 1,500 Tweets were hashtagged to indicate they were related to the meeting.

In a previous blog post, I looked at how about 30 conferences were hashtagged. I observed that the choice of hashtag was usually not an issue, and tweets were rarely divergently tagged after the first day of a conference. Avoidance of irrelevent subjects was the most important consideration in choice of hashtag. At ALA, as you might expect, there were more than the usual number of tweets asking which hashtag to use; this occurred even near the end of the meeting. Although the official hashtag was "#ala2009", there was a greater than 5% rate of divergent hashtag use, "#ala09" and "#ala". The latter tag was a poor choice due to conflict with other subjects. In my limited sample set, most conferences saw less divergent hashtag use.

As ALA is a large meeting, several sessions exhibited their own hashtags. The most tweeted "session" that I observed was "#unala2009". I wonder if there is a practical limit to the tweet-rate. At some tweet-rate, perhaps 1000 per day, people will want to start tweeting to a more specific hashtag. The "Top Tech Trends" twitterers battled to a 30-30 tie for the hashtags "#toptech" and "#ttt09".

Also noteworthy was the appearance and disappearance of the "ALAsecrets" account and associated twitterspam. This account published its password to allow for anonymous twittering. Interesting idea, poorly implemented. If only the librarians responsible would have created a librarian specific password like the one that scientists always use for numerical locks on their labs, 3 1 4 etc. Use the comments to propose a "shibboleth" for librarians. (Dewey's first name?)

Addendum: after posting, I realized that I should count the number of ALA tweets that used multiple ALA hashtags. 59% of tweets using the "wrong" hashtag also included the official hashtag. With that correction, the divergence rate went down to 2%, roughly the same as that found overall in my previous study.
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Conference Hashtags Don't Evolve

Leigh Dodds suggested yesterday that someone should do an "evolutionary study" on successful and failed conference hashtags. Since I've been interested in the way that vocabulary propagates on networks, I decided to take up the idea and do a bit of data collection.

If you're not on Twitter, or haven't been to a conference recently, you may not have encountered the practice of hashtagging a conference. The hashtag is just a string that allows search engines to group together posts on a single topic. It's become popular to use twitter as a back-channel to discuss conference presentations while they happen (does anyone still use IRC for this?), or to report on things being discussed at a meeting. The hashtags can also be used on services such as Flickr. I'll be attending the Semantic Technology conference in San Jose next week, and there was a bit of back and forth about what the right hashtag should be, semtech09 or semtech2009. Someone connected to the conference asserted that the longer version was preferred, sparking Leigh's remark.

To collect data, I search Twitter for "conference" AND "hashtag" and compiled all the results from 7 and 8 days ago. That gave me a list of 30 conferences, and I searched for all tweets which included the hashtags for all these conferences. "MediaBistro Circus" (#mbcircus) was the most referenced of any of these, with 1500 tweets in all.

There was no evidence at all of anything resembling evolution. Almost all the hashtags appeared spontaneously and without controversy, each one apparently via the agency of an intelligent designer. I did not find a single example of multiple hashtags competing with each other in a "survival of the fittest" sort of way. I found two instances of dead-on-arrival hashtags, which were proposed once and never repeated. In only one case was there significant usage of an alternate hashtag- the America's Future Now conference appeared in 22 tweets as #afn09, compared to 949 tweets for #afn. Even in this case, there appeared to be no competition, as the #afn09 tweeters stuck with their hashtag.

One question posed by the initial query was whether "09" or "2009" was the correct convention. Although "09" was 2 to 3 times more popular than "2009" in hashtags, having no year indicator at all was twice as frequent as having a year. What was very clear, however, was that avoidance of unrelated hashtags was the clear preference of hashtag selectors. The most interesting examples of this were the "#cw2009" and "#cw09" hashtags used for ComplianceWeek Conference and CodeWorks Conference, respectively.

None of this is surprising in retrospect. It's quite easy to see if a hashtag is the right one- you just enter in a search to see what comes up before you put it in your tweet. If you can't find one that works as you want it to, most likely you will not use a hashtag at all. Conferences tend to be meetings of people who are connected to each other via common interests, and a small number of people tend to update frequently and be followed by large numbers of people with common interests. Conference goers also seem to be very motivated to propagate and adopt hashtags- hashtag announcements for conferences are quite frequently retweeted.

The behavior of people selecting hashtags is quite uniform. However, I've previously noted another meeting of semantic web folk that had trouble getting their hashtag straight. Perhaps people who develop taxonomies for a living are less likely to adopt other peoples' suggested vocabulary based on a feeling that their way is the best way, and thus are more likely to silo themselves. I've seen this phenomenon before- the phones at Bell Labs never seemed to work very well, and my wife's experience with computers at IBM was not exactly problem-free. The Librarian Conferences I've been to seem to have horrible classification systems. Perhaps one way to improve vocabulary propagation on the semantic web is to get rid of the ontologists!
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My Pathetic Life (#mpl) and Collaborative Intelligence

I'm still pretty new to Twitter, but it feels pretty familiar to me. Part of the reason for that is that some of my Facebook friends have been parallel posting their status on Facebook and on Twitter. This mostly annoyed me, because Twitterers update their statuses more often than facebookers, and a lot of the Twitter vernacular is totally inexplicable when viewed on Facebook. On Twitter, by contrast, I find that I'm annoyed when people that I follow, but don't really know, mix details from their personal lives into their otherwise interesting Twitter streams. For example, I follow dchud because I know that he will throw out some very interesting ideas. (He was the very first person to follow me on Twitter; I was the very first person to comment on his blog way back when). But I'm not really interested in his reports on the Washington Capitols. Somehow I find that Facebook is a much better place to get to know details like that- if you friend me there, you'll find that I'm a rabid fan of the Philadelphia Phillies, and I won't mind it if you update me on the triumphs of your Columbus Blue Jackets. We both knew they would lose eventually.

The thing that intrigues me about Twitter is that it does so little so well that it's really a lot easier to fix the problems that it has. The past two days I've been writing about the challenges of propagating vocabulary (and grammar for that matter!) for use in the semantic web. Yesterday, Google demonstrated one way of propagating vocabulary- be big and powerful and just tell the world what vocabulary to use. Ian Davis called Google's approach to implementing RDFa "a damp squib" which is what Americans would less colorfully call a "dud" or a wet firecracker. He lamented that Google had chosen to use their own limited vocabulary rather than adopt vocabulary already in use. R.V. Guha, who I mentioned in yesterday's post, commented on Davis' blog that we shouldn't judge too soon what Google is doing. A lot of us are hoping that "igniter fuse" will turn out to be an apter pyrotechnical analogy.

The other strategy for vocabulary propgation is based on community-based collaboration. In my post yesterday, I complained that it was hard to find vocabulary that I might use to attach an ISBN to a resource. In contrast, Twitter, together with the accessories that are built around it, seems to enable rapid propagation of vocabulary and grammar. So back to my complaint about how Twitter streams seem to annoyingly mix tweets of varying interest. One way that people deal with this is to use multiple accounts to organize their tweets in different genres, the same way you might want to have a business email and a personal email. Perhaps a better, more flexible way to address this would be to adopt a special hashtag to signal that a tweet is not a product of one's brilliant intellect, but rather just a status message about "my personal life" (#mpl). That way, your mom can easily filter out your irrelevant work stuff and and your boss can filter out your irrelevant personal stuff. Anyway, if you think this a good idea, see if you can help propagate the use of #mpl (let's call the idea #mplIdea). If you don't think it's a good idea, or if there's some better way to fix this twitter deficiency, leave a comment. Let's see if we can demonstrate the power of the collaborative approach to vocabulary propagation.

The adoption of RDFa by Google and their centralized approach to vocabulary may be a turning point in the first stage of the semantic web- that of using the web to aggregate data. I think this approach is not going to take us very far. We need to start building the second stage of the semantic web. We should be thinking about collaborative intelligence rather than about accumulating distributed sets of data. I don't expect that machines will be able to come up with ideas like #mplIdea, but I do think it's reasonable for machines to be able to help us judge wether ideas like #mplIdea are inspired (and should be propagated) or whether they're just stupid.

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