Twitip

By Joi Murugavell – Follow her @joidesign

A short definition of hashtags:

On Twitter hashtags act as a means to create ‘groupings’ of tweets about a specific topic. Anyone can create a hashtag on twitter by simply appending # to a word (preferably a short word). Then other people who are interested in this topic look up the hashtag and ta-da all tweets about that particular topic are in one place. A recent event using hashtags brilliantly is #marketingnow. The diverse and often opposing opinions on hashtags is what makes it a powerful learning tool. Read more about hashtags and find out how to use them here.

The good

Hashtags are often used by companies to form a collective knowledge-base (and pats on the back) ‘in one place’. Adobe does this extremely well. Check out this example  of multiple hashtags being used to announce Adobe’s plans to open the iPhone to flash developers with its release of FlashCS5 (huge news for developers and iPhone users).

In his tweet, @mszulc from Adobe skillfully uses 3 hashtags in one tweet (and even leaves character space for retweets, that’s pretty impressive!) By doing this, @mszulc adds to Adobe’s twitter knowledge base. He also added the ‘iPhone’ hashtag in, so folks who follow the iPhone tag can view the new announcement which is getting iPhone users excited it all sorts of excitable ways!

The bad

The bad side of hashtags is of course its best feature – ‘transparency’. A recent hashtag born out of extreme annoyance/hatred (quite funny) is #iSnack2.0 which was then nicknamed #vegefail Here, Kraft hating demons of fire exist, completely trashing Kraft’s new brand iSnack2.0. Kraft was no where to be seen putting out fires in their hashtag (they did listen and eventually pulled the name). The passion against the name was then of course transferred to their corporate hashtag #kraft, which used to have a mixture of news, comments, good stuff but is now dominated by iSnack2.0 laments.

Monitoring unstable temperatures in your hashtag

You can’t control what people say on a hashtag about your company. If you look at #Adobe you’ll see a mixture of comments from “yes! well done! Adobe releases flash for iphones” (which is the hot topic as I write this) to “my illustratorCS4 keeps crashing you suck Adobe!” etc. The negative and positive (temperature) in the Adobe hashtag is at a very healthy level, with more positives than negatives (at the moment).

People are hashtag trigger happy, it only takes one unhappy customer to start a hashtag. For corporates, your hashtag is definitely not something you want to leave ‘on its own’ with a ‘what will, be will be’ attitude as it could quite quickly become a very large potty where you know … potty things happen.

I recently bumped into a hastag about a CMS/hosting product we use to build websites. Its a fairly new, small hashtag with a current negative temperature. It was started by someone who was annoyed their email was down. Then someone else joined in and someone else etc. If you bumped into this particular hashtag now, it would seem like its your very own little corner to whinge about this particular product. At the moment it has the unfortunate building blocks of a potty (a shame, as its a brilliant product).

A predominantly negative hashtag doesn’t exactly inspire you to say good things like “this is an amazing product”. A little peer pressure comes into play here too, if everyone is whinging you kinda feel a little bit out of place if you actually want to say something nice. Negativity loves company.

Quick ways to plant some roses in a hashtag potty:

1) Start by telling a select group of people about your hashtag, encourage them to leave comments and get a conversation going with your hashtag, seed it with a topic.

2) Encourage your staff to use your hashtag, posting latest events, product enhancements, accolades etc

3) If you host an event, add your hashtag to your banners or simply let everyone know what it is (get lots of noise in there)

4) Ask your clients on twitter to post a short testimonial with your hashtag. Most people who are happy with you, will be more than happy to tweet about you.

These are pretty simple things you can do right away, to throw a bunch of flowers in the potty mix.

Hashtag potty mouths: Think before you poo

At times its enjoyable to jump on the hashtag lament bandwagon. Who doesn’t like a big ol grumpy wumpy on twitter! Unfortunately, even though twitter encourages spontaneity, most of us who are not anonymous, still have to think a little before we tweet (sigh?).

Probably the worst example I’ve come across was a bunch of people putting down a product they actually on-sell to their customers – not the best sales tactic is it? – #doh.

Further reading

How to get the most out of twitter hashtags Finding your community within a community
Tools for monitoring conversations in Twitter
Hashtags are dying – here’s how to save them
What the hashtag – a user edited hashtag directory

[image: Torley]