Watching people using Twitter is always interesting, and no more so than in the area of hashtags. For those of you who are going 'uh?' at the moment a hashtag is a way that people can follow a particular subject, event or conference report on Twitter by searching for a predefined hashtag such as #cilip2. As long as everyone uses the same hashtag then it doesn't matter if they're being followed by the searcher, since all their tweets will show up in a search.
The problem with a hashtag is that it takes up very important real estate in Twitter. There's only 140 characters to play with and the longer the hashtag the less space for the rest of the tweet. Consequently these things need to be as short as possible, but I'm seeing people using insanely long ones. What's interesting is that there does appear to be something of a difference in the way that they're used by different groups of people. For example, the hashtag for the CILIP Umbrella conference is #cilipumbrella. The American ALA conference 2009 uses #ala09 which is shorter. The Computers in Libraries conference used #cil2009. What these all have in common is an attempt to make it perfectly clear what the hashtag refers to, basically as a keyword or descriptor. Which is understandable, because that's what librarians do.
However, if we compare those tags to say, the one used for the Web 2.0 Expo which is #w2e there's something of a difference, because if I hadn't said upfront what #w2e related to you probably wouldn't have known. What's also interesting is that it's not #w2e2009 or even #w2e09. I'm slightly grasping at ideas here, but I think the major difference is that people who do technical stuff such as programming have a different approach to the concept of tags, because they'll use them just as an anchor; as long as they can remember what the tag or anchor is for that's fine.
All that a hashtag really needs to is to alert people, so that they can find appropriate tweets in a search - it doesn't have to *mean* anything at all, as long as everyone agrees on the use. That, after all, is what social media and Web 2 stuff is all about isn't it? A group of people agreeing on something. If that agreement isn't forthcoming, or it's too difficult (or long winded!) to impliment there's going to be something of a breakdown in use, and the hashtag fails. If you look on Twitter people are discussing the Umbrella hashtag, trying to decide for themselves if it should be reduced to #umb09 or #umbrella09. If people are tweeting using a mobile the less keystrokes the better. As a result, we're getting people using all three hashtags, which entirely defeats the point of the exercise!
A hashtag needs to be as short as possible. Is there any need to include the year or number of a conference in the tag? In my opinion, not at all. If I see people tweeting in numbers about something I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I'll presume they're doing so about something happening this year, not last year or last decade. To include 2009 in a tag is insanity surely? We KNOW it's happening now, this year, this month, this day, this minute because that's when people are tweeting about it!
Does the tag need to include the name of the conference? Again, in my opinion I don't think it's necessary to include the entire thing. Take the CILIP Umbrella conference - is anyone else running a conference at the same time, also called Umbrella? I'd guess not. Maybe the tag could be cut down to #umbrella then? Well it could, but the case could be made that some people might use that tag to refer to the item as in 'damn, it's raining. Forgot my #umbrella'. Kinda pointless to turn that into a hashtag (anyone who wants to search for umbrella could just do so), but it's possible. So how about making it shorter again? #umb works quite well and most importantly a search for #umb shows that no-one is using it. (Sorry, I'm not trying to knock CILIP at all, but it's a very useful example)
It could be argued, and I'm sure is, that people wouldn't necessarily think to search for that on Twitter. Absolutely right. That's not the point however. If I want to find the hashtag for an event I'm likely to ask the organisers, or visit the webpage or do a general search on Twitter for the name of the conference. Either that or I'll see people that I'm following use a tag and I'll then explore what the tag is for - maybe even asking the person what the tag is; given that it's Twitter I should get an answer back almost at once. People who aren't used to the concept of hashtags are not going to care, be interested, or search on a tag.
What is needed is for an organiser to stop thinking of a hashtag as a keyword or descriptor, and start thinking of it as a simple marker. True, there are times when hashtags are valuable, such as #iranelection and they're fairly obvious, because they relate to naturally occuring events. Conferences are not like that - they're artifical, names are chosen for a wide variety of reasons, why should the hashtag be any different? Keep the tag as short as possible - and anything longer than 3 characters is too long in my opinion and make it clear on the website what the tag is. They should also tweet it, and now and then use the full name of the conference in the tweet along with the hashtag, for those people who are wondering what a hashtag means. That way everyone is clear on the tag, can find and use it easily and leave more room for the rest of the tweet.
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