Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, is all about relationship building. Yes, you can promote the kind of doughnut that you’re eating (and ask everyone else which kind they like), share the movie you saw last night (without revealing the ending), or you can build (or add-to) communities by using “Hash Tags”
Hash Tags (characters or numbers preceded by the # sign – like #HSTG) are placed somewhere in you message, usually at the end, that literally tag that message among a group of similarly tagged messages. Guess what – you have a group, a tribe, or some common way of communicating among a group of people who know about the Hash Tag, and use it to mark that message to be read by the people who know the tag. I’ll get to how to use it in a teleconference in a bit.
Let’s say you’re part of a community – people who live in New York City (where I grew up). I found out that there is a Hash Tag in use named #NYC. People who are twittering on topics pertaining to New York City, and want their tweets to be seen by people who are following tweets about New York City (aside from their own followers), might say something like this: “If you’re traveling to NYC and want to really see the harbor, take the Staten Island Ferry #NYC” (95 characters total). If I was a follower of that person I would see the tweet in my list of tweets from those I follow. If I was not following that person I could do a twitter search (“search” option at the bottom of your Twitter screen, the same as going to http://search.twtter.com) and searching on “#NYC,” and that post would be a part of my search results, with many others with that Hash Tag.
Teleseminar Use: If hosting a teleseminar, you can define a Hash Tag that represents your seminar topic. For example Leesa Barnes of Marketing Fit, who hosted the 2009 Social Media Telesummit used the Hash Tag #SMT09 on all of her promotional posts, letters to presenters and teleseminar participants, and used the Hash Tag during the teleseminar calls. To do this make sure that you tell your participants the Hash Tag to use and those who want to be on Twitter during the call, can tweet with each other, guests and hosts, as long as the Hash Tag is part of the message. These posts can always be viewed later on by those who could not make the live call.
This gets better. There is an applicaton called TweetChat www.tweetchat.com which lets you filter out only the tweets which contain the Hash Tag for the call. Encourage your hosts and particpants to use TweetChat. Here’s a step-by-step method:
Use of Hash Tags will allow your teleseminars to really sparkle. Every tweet that anyone uses also goes out to the followers for that person, so don’t be surprised when followers start asking what that Hash Tag represents. Great way to market the teleseminar because more folks will see the Hash Tag, and this is a great way for interaction on the calls, TweetChat makes it even easier.