Hashtags can be handy. Hashtags can be good. But in my first trip to the SXSW conference, ironically, I’m getting a first-hand view of when hashtags can go totally wrong.
Someone decided it would be a great idea for every session to have a hashtag. OK, I get that. It makes it easy to see a conversation around a particular session. But the bad idea was giving no real thought to the length of those tags.
Consider. I’ve been on two sessions this week. One was Getting Your Game Found In Search Engines, with the assigned tag of:
#gamefoundsearchengines
That’s 23 characters — 16% of the total 140 you’re allowed in a tweet. Why so long? Why not #gameengine or #gamesearch or #gmsch
Another session was Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web, where the hashtag was:
#beyondalgorithms
That’s 17 characters, 12% of the total 140. Why not #beyondalgo or #balgo?
Now consider the hashtags suggested for today’s keynote by Twitter cofounder Evan Williams:
#SXSW #evwilliams #mondaykeynote
That’s 32 characters, 23% of the space available. Thank goodness Ev is just @ev on Twitter. Because if you want to tweet anything he says — and use all those hashtags to be part of the stream — and use his Twitter name — you’re not going to have much room left!
I have a lot of sympathy for the organizers, in that there’s 100 zillion sessions going on, so making hashtags for all of them is tough. But if you’re going to do it, put hashtags out there, then do it right.
Ideas? My top-of-the-head tips:
Keep them short. That’s obvious
They don’t have to make sense. That algorithm session? The hashtag could have easily been something like #algosxsw or #sxsw23. I like the last one especially. You’re just looking for a way to consolidate all tweets from a particular session around a particular tag. Give them unique numbers!
They’re reusable. Hashtags don’t have to be unique for each event. If SXSW uses #sxsw23 this year, it can use it for a completely different session next year. Why? Because most hasttag searches, I’d wager, happen at the time a particular event is happening. No one’s going to see “old” information from #sxsw23 (if that’s what was used) when the latest one goes on.
That’s one reason why for my own Search Marketing Expo confernces, the hashtag we use is always #smx. Not #smxadvanced or #smx2010 or #smxwest. Just #smx. Usually, our shows are well spaced from each other. But we’ve even had shows in Sydney and Canada happen right at the same time, both using the same hashtag, without that much confusion. Being in different timezones, there wasn’t much overlap.
We don’t assign hashtags to particular sessions. That’s just felt like overkill to me. But we’ll have five sessions going on at the same time, so that might actually be good. If we do that in the future, I’ll go for following some of my own advice!
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You are of course right. What’s interesting though, is why people do come up with absurdly long tags, and it’s because they don’t understand the basic principle behind it. People will use tags because they think it’s some sort of classification scheme – particularly with library/info science conferences. This is why they add dates as well, which leads to the second point of misunderstanding – they don’t understand Twitter. Which also means that they don’t really get real time content and real time search. They’re still living in an old paradigm, where content needs to be badged, defined, catalogued and classified. As long as everyone can agree on the tag, what it actually *is* doesn’t really matter.
That’s really the issue that needs to be addressed; the basic lack of understanding. If you can do that (and it’s a big ‘if’) then the hashtag problem falls away pretty quickly.
I agree with you partially but not on the re-using the hashtags part, unless you’ve exahusted your options. It would be nice to know that a given tag not only represents a subset of people & a topic, but also a snapshot in time, in history per se of what was being talked about. So at times, I think its good to have the 2010 part.
In relationship to the lenght of the tag, I think 5 – 7 characters should be enough, so it doesn’t interfere with the main content, if you can call ~120 characters “content.”
Oscar – what you do in that case is archive the tweets themselves so that you have them for the future, perhaps making a word cloud out of them. If you do need a date, (and like Danny I’m not convinced that you do), it shouldn’t be necessary to have any more than the last figure, so anything this year would have a hashtag that ends in 0, next year ends in 1, and so on. By the time there’s going to be any confusion a decade will have gone past and we’ll all be doing something different by then anyway.
Hi Phil, sure I understand what you mean and I guess I do agree with you. The question is though, who would archive the tweets. One’s self? the event organizer? twitter? archive.org? But you pretty much nailed it with the last 7 words of your comment.
Hi Oscar – I think the answer to your question is ‘possibly all of them’. If I was a conference organiser, I’d be taking responsibility for it. If I wasn’t, and wanted copies, again, it’s down to me. I think it’s just another of the housekeeping duties for individuals and companies.
Great points, I think alot of folks were a bit surprised by the length of the session tags. I know alot of folks around me chuckled when you commented in the algorithm session, “and after that, you might have some room to tweet”.
I had pitched for a session on making events social, based on work from some festival projects. I think a great opportunity for someone like yourself to pitch a similar session as it relates to events. With the proliferation of “un-conferences” I think there would be some value there.
You’ve definately turned into the Jakob Nielsen of SEOs.
It was an excellent post. Too many conferences use these long hashtags.
I notice allot of businesses just don’t know what hash tags are, what they do, and the value of using hash tags to identify sessions. I agree that hash tags are best when used in under 7 characters. However, preferably under 5 characters.
Last year, we saw the emergence of the technology PubSubHubbub, which provides real-time notifications to subscribers of content when there is new content or updates being made. There has recently been allot of talk about Google developing a system that would use this technology in its indexing process. Matt Cutts recently clarified this in a video with WPN.
What we need is a hashtag shortening service
People are using tags now in other ways, like just to give additional content to a tweet. In some cases I’m starting to find out maybe it isn’t so bad to have a long hashtag, sometimes they’re funny. Also see what I wrote about it on my blog. “hash-tagging it up…”
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