Virtual Press Conference & Power of Hashtags
Yesterday we talked very quickly about the Mzinga and Prospero merger and their Twitter Q&A. I was really excited to see how it would play out, particularly with all the noise that has been on Twitter as of late. For some good coverage of the merger and direct thoughts from Mzinga’s Aaron Strout and Prospero’s Colin Browning check out Bryan Person’s interview. What I wanted to focus on was the power of hashtags and what I learned following the virtual press conference. At first I was following the action on Twhirl (my preferred Twitter app), but it looks something like this:
Difficult to follow the specific conversation, to say the least.
Now I’ve been aware of using ‘hashtags’ within Twitter, using them most recently during the Academy Awards. “STOP…for those of us who don’t Twitter, or Utterz or even Flickr…what are hashtags?”
Hashtags help group conversations by using the hash symbol (#) followed by some text. For example the hashtag for the Academy Awards was “#aa08” and for the Mzinga/Prospero Q&A it was “#mz“. Think of them as simply tags that allow you to quickly search a conversation topic. In the past that is exactly what I would do, simply plug in the hashtag in Terramind and catch up on the topic…which is how I followed all the Tweets last fall while the Sox took down another Championship (otherwise known as #PL7).
Hashtags, as I hope you can see, can be a very powerful way for you to bring together a community on a common topic. Fortunately there are also tools that now allow you to more easily follow these conversations. Twemes and Hashtags were the two mentioned the most yesterday. These sites gather the hashtags into a chronological conversation and in the case of Hashtag provide some interesting analytics at the top:
Not only is it easier to read, but allows you to search tags, look at the most popular, etc. Twemes is similar, but I’m not a fan of the design in the background of the page, I think it might give me a seizure after a small amount of time. The end point however is that the ability to use Twitter is enhanced by hashtags and they give you ability to have a true conversation with folks around a topic, event, company or more.
So the important question…what hashtag should we use to monitor the progress of the 2008 Red Sox? #sox08? #RS08?
/kff
March 4th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Great post, Kyle. Hashtags are the best way I know to filter out specific posts from Twitter’s sometimes very chaotic, jumbled-up flow of Tweets. In the case of yesterday’s virtual press conference, both Mzinga and members of the community were able to use the hashtag to keep track of all the posts, and the messages have a way to stand alone as a reflection of all the conversation and buzz around the acquisition.
As for Red Sox ‘08 posts, I’m leaning toward #RS08 or even #RS? Each character is precious, after all!
March 4th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Saw a tweet about this blog post from @astrout. Glad you are finding the site useful. We have lots of stuff getting queued up for development on hashtags.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Good summary Kyle. I’m on the Mzinga team and took part in the Twitter experiment yesterday. Colin and Aaron did a good job of summarizing the experience, less the mention of Colin coming up with the idea in the shower (not a visual I need). ;-)
I put together a Grazr widget to follow the Tweets, including feeds for #mz, Mzinga and Prospero. I found that was effective at capturing some of the tweets that would have fallen through the cracks if I only followed #mz. Link to the widget is below:
http://tinyurl.com/22y2fy
Like Bryan, I’m a fan of fewer characters for the Red Sox chatter. Let me know what you come up with!
March 4th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Kyle - thanks for the favorable coverage. I also completely agree that we should be doing more with hash tags. Now that I know about http://twemes.com, I plan to use them and follow them more frequently!
Best,
Aaron (@astrout)
March 5th, 2008 at 5:48 am
Aaron F–Thanks for stopping by, very much looking forward to using Hashtags.org more and more.
Jim and Aaron S–Thanks for stopping by, looking forward to following how the merger turns out for you guys. The TweetConference was a terrific idea (although I agree with no need for the shower visual).
Bryan–I like the simplicity of #RS…let’s run with it!
All in all I’m interested to see if hashtags take off b/c I’ve already seen a bit of a backlash from folks not liking to see them within Tweets. I’m hoping Twitter could come up with something to allow us to more easily embed hashtags and make them more aesthetically pleasing to the reader.
/kff
March 5th, 2008 at 7:26 am
[…] Yesterday’s post continues to push me to check out more tools that are out there in the ether. Jim Storer or Mzinga mentioned Grazr in his comment to the discussion, I of course spent the next 45 minutes over at Grazr. […]