Conference hashtags are not keywords!

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.

Comments

[Donald H Taylor]

Hi Phil

Why include a year in the tag? Well, what will Web 2.0 Expo use for the hashtag next year? Ideally you put the year on the end of the tag so that people can search either for *all* years', or just *this* year's event.

Also - although Twitter's an important place for hashtags, it's not the only one. Blogs, wikis, press releases, comments anywhere can all use the hashtag. It's a step back towards taxonomy from folksonomy because when you have a lot of information available, finding what you want fast is important - I guess that's something librarians and programmers both recognise!

Cheers

Don

[Phil Bradley]

Hi Don,
Thanks for taking the time to reply. A quick answer is that Twitter is so bad at storing and retrieving information I doubt that the content we have today will be accessible from Twitter in a years time. Try it yourself - see how much content you can get from searching for something that's a year old, chances are high that there's nothing there. Secondly, if Twitter does work it out you can use their search option to exclude material that's been posted before a specific date. Third, Twitter is really designed to be a real time communication resource, and that's what it excels at. I'd expect a conference organiser to actually gather the tweets and make them available in one single place, the way that @DaveP did with the #cilip2 resources, so that they can be saved, archived and made available for searching in the future without relying on Twitter. So I'd say that next years Web 2 Expo will probably use the same tag, and it's not going to cause *any* problems. I remain entirely unconvinced that it's necessary to put a date into a tag unless there's a very good reason. An annual conference isn't a good enough reason IMO.

I think your second point is a good one though, but equally it's reasonable to expect that if anyone is searching for specific content they're going to be able to limit by date in their search. Sure, anywhere can use a tag, but I'd have thought most searches would be more inclined to use the full name of a conference initially, because they're not going to know the hashtag that's being used! It's not going to take them long to find the appropriate site, see the hashtag and search on that.

Still not convinced. :)

Phil.

[Bradley Holt]

Phil, I agree with most everything you've said here. People forget that hashtags are just tags - or folksonomy. A tag is simply part of a shared vocabulary. As long as people have a shared understanding of the meaning of a tag it doesn't matter what the actual tag is. One additional consideration: it can be very useful to use the *same* tag across multiple sites (e.g. Twitter, blog posts, Flickr, Delicious). I've seen this done at several conferences and it works quite well. We've actually built a site - http://tagnabit.net/ - that lets people aggregate any single tag across multiple sites. So, one other thing to consider when choosing a conference tag :-)

[S.W.Schilke]

Well think about the hashtag as a kind of brand extension - that's why we use #INC2010 which is our hashtag for our International Network Conference in 2010 in Heidelberg, Germany (please see http://www.inc2010.org for details). We use the year because 2010 in the hashtag as we are organizing the conference - the next conference will have other organizers (like a challenge cup ;-) but all conferences are INC

[Arne van Elk]

Hi Phil, it's interesting that you mention the #ala09-hashtag. I'm just reading this post comparing the different hashtags being used at the conference: http://bit.ly/sir2U
Actually the 'official' hastag was #ala2009. But what's official about hashtags? :-)

[Eric Hellman]

In addition to the post by Arne van Elk, I posted an article about conference hashtags at http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2009/06/conference-hashtags-dont-evolve.html A key point is that the hashtags try to avoid collisions.

Also, the umbrella conference had a rare hashtag divergence, with #cilipumbrella barely beating out #umb in number of tweets, 63 to 53

[JamesM]

Phil really interesting post I'd never really thought about hashtags in much detail until now. I have to say using a number/date in a hashtag does seems a bit odd because as you say you know the event or topic is happening right now. I don't need to know it is 2009.

I suppose the other thing around naming is the longer ones tend to be by librarians we want to make things as descriptive as possible, even if that then means we are limited in how much we can post to Twitter.