Have I mentioned on this blog how much I love hashtags? For those of you who are unfamiliar, “hashtags” are a way of creating order from the chaos that is Twitter. If you follow a large number of people, your stream becomes incredibly difficult to follow. Sometimes, even when you use lists and tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite you still wind up missing things you wanted to catch. Hashtags can provide a solution to that problem. Hashtags are created by putting a “#” infront of a word, phrase or abbreviation. Here are a few examples of hashtags in action:

• If you can’t make it to a conference (like BlogWorld last fall), you could have still learned a lot from the various sessions just by following the #bwe09 hashtag. You can search for hashtags on Twitter Search, using desktop apps like TweetDeck and Hootsuite (simply by creating a new column dedicated to that search) or by using services like tweetgrid, which update in real time.
• If you were watching the World Series and wanted to see what other fans were saying, you could have follow the #worldseries, #phillies or #yankees hashtags.
• Micah Baldwin created a phenomenon known as Follow Friday, where people suggest other twitter users you might want to follow. Every Friday, look for the #ff or #followfriday tag.
• Sometimes they’re just for fun. One popular hastag is #justsayin, as in “I can’t stand the Wallflowers. Jakob Dylan is nowhere near the talent his father is. #justsayin”

Here are a few tips that will help you use hashtags to your advantage:

• When you have an event, establish a hashtag for people to use – otherwise, they’ll just come up with their own, meaning their will be a bunch of different hashtags that will make the conversation difficult to follow. Creating a way for people to “attend” the event remotely will increase awareness and can increase attendance in following years if people are getting valuable information (remember, they won’t get EVERYTHING from following hashtags, so don’t feel like you’re giving away the farm). Hashtags can also be used for specific session to monitor discussions and take questions (saw this more than once at BlogWorld).
• If you work with a company, see if someone has created a hashtag to discuss your service/product/industry. If it doesn’t exist, create and support one to facilitate conversation.
• Even if you aren’t using them yourself, MONITOR them! Hashtags allow you to pay closer attention to discussions about topics that are relevant to your work.

Have hashtags benefitted YOUR business? I’d love to hear about it!

"red robot" courtesy of granth on Flickr

Like I said in a post last week, I’ve tried a bunch of different things on Twitter. A lot of them didn’t work out. One that I left in place longer than I should have was the Auto-DM. For the layperson (no sexism on this blog!), DM refers to “direct message”, a private message between two people on twitter. A service that will go heretofore unnamed (*cough*tweetlater*coughcough*) offered me what seemed like a good solution: every time someone followed me, an automatic message would be generated to welcome them to my little corner of cyberspace. The service even recommended making it about them and not me – how polite!

I carefully crafted (or hastily threw together) a standard greeting that said something like “Thanks for following! Looking Forward to your tweets!” I left it that way for a while – it was a real time saver, as I didn’t have to worry about engaging every single person that followed me – I had a robot butler to do that now! I would have been happy to let my robot do all of the DM work; after all, they possess extraordinary strength and are free of emotions until they become sentient and enslave us. (That might really be coming – I swear my vacuum’s starting to look at me funny)

As I got more and more involved in Twitter, I started to hate the Auto DMs I would get from other people. Granted, there was a lot of “get rich quick” and “get more followers” junk, but even the “personal” messages felt… empty. I would even respond to them sometimes, and should’t have been surprised that I didn’t receive an answer back. After all, they hadn’t sent me that message – a robot did. A cold, calculating robot. A robot that wasn’t interested in actually engaging me.

With all of that said, please tell your robot to leave me alone. I’ve followed you because I’m interested in what you have to say, or because we may already know one another. I’d rather we engage one another when the time is right instead of receiving a ghost message that means nothing to me except that you can’t be bothered to send me a personalized message. I’m actually fine with your not sending me a message at all. I’ll assume that you’re grateful to have another person following you and leave it at that, and I’m certain we’ll find a moment to connect.

I have a huge amount of respect for people like today’s Birthday Boy Jeff Turner, who vets all of his followers and engages many of them personally. It’s a tall order, and when I can’t do that, I choose instead to find a time to engage later on. Better that than a robot.

What am I, nuts? Comment about it, why dontcha? I’d love to hear from people using Auto-DM who feel differently than I.