What are hashtags?

I have borrowed and edited a brilliant article by Devon Smith @24usablehours. His blogs often go into great detail with lots of statistics and evidence to support his arguments, so if you would like this level of detail please go to http://bit.ly/cJzb1I to read the full blog.

However, I find that his summary of 'What are Hashtags' makes a perfect introduction to hastages and demonstrates the different ways they can be used and also how non profilt organisations can then use these to their advantage.

What are hashtags?

In the past three years, the use of social media by nonprofits (and the general population) has grown exponentially. There are now 500 million people using Facebook, 200 million searching Twitter, and 150 million watching YouTube . Six years ago, none of these sites existed. As an asymmetric public network (user A can “follow,” or read, user B’s “tweets,” or posts, without user B’s permission and without user B having to read user A’s posts), Twitter best provides the opportunity for large, de-centralised, archivable, searchable conversations.

In Twitter’s early days, features were limited so users created their own taxonomy. In August of 2007 Chris Messina first proposed using the hash symbol “#” to help group similar conversations happening on Twitter. This combined the searchable tags of metadata on sites like Flickr with the topically oriented channels of IRC. In their 2010 usage, hashtags have come to serve at least five different functions:

1. To keep track of an ongoing conversation (#nonprofit)
2. To broadcast the happenings of a one time event, conference, or emergency (#haiti)
3. To get into Twitter’s list of trending topics (#justinbieber)
4. To comment on the intent of the post (#ironic)
5. To provide additional metadata about the tweet, such as location or speaker (#NYC)

Searching for any of the “#words” on Twitter’s native search client returns all posts marked with such a tag over the past week. Searching for the same on Google’s “Search Updates” returns selected posts from approximately the past month (and will eventually include all posts since Twitter’s inception). Specialized archiving programs like TwapperKeeper, Searchtastic, and The Archivist store all posts marked with a #word, and allow for an exportable excel document. Hashtags themselves can be searched at hashtags.org, the semi-official repository of hashtags in use. However, as a user created phenomenon, new uses and groupings of hashtags are constantly being created.

How are nonprofits using hashtags?

Nonprofits have run with the hashtag concept and there are now hundreds of public conversations on Twitter covering topics as diverse as #philanthropy, #climate, and #pubmedia. I am particularly interested in the potential for information and ideas to cross industry, functional, and demographic boundaries in these hashtag conversations. Two such tags (#edchat and #2amt) appear to be quite different in the:

1. History of the hashtag’s origination
2. Degree of current moderation implemented
3. Frequency, volume, and diversity of posts
4. Number and diversity of users

So let’s dive a little deeper into what makes these conversations (and these people) tick.http://bit.ly/cJzb1I

If you have any success stories with using Hashtags to promotes events or start generating a conversation regarding your interests, please feel free to share your hastag with us...