Hashtags To Be Registered Like Domain Names?

Here’s a thought: hashtags which can be frustrating to find, understand and keep together should be registered just like domain names.

• Conversations and groups could attach to an official hashtag, links to websites created.
• Standardised hashtags would reduce clutter (multiple hashtags on one topic).
• Confusion over semantics would be reduced, faster access/understanding of conversations increased.
• Purchasing a hashtag would increase the value for the owner of the hashtag.

How could this be a bad thing?

Twitter Moderators: Better Twitter Value At Your Next Conference

One of the most annoying things about using hashtags on Twitter is that there is no way to ensure that people are using the ‘right’ hashtag for your event or conference. HashDictionary - the hashtag dictionary, can help with what the hashtag means but what if you have 1000 people at a conference, only 10 people know about the official hashtag and there are five or six other hashtags being used? Employ the use of Twitter moderators.

Twitter Moderators

I first came upon the idea of Twitter moderators when interacting with @FiBendall and others at the Ad:Tech conference in Sydney. Fi and some other well known tweeple had been pulled in to broadcast and organise the Tweet stream out of the conference. They would setup relevant hashtags, tweet about what was happening at the conference and were promoted at the conference as Twitter moderators.

The Benefits of Twitter Moderators

Obviously people are free to tweet what they want while at an event or conference and will continue to do so without the help or interference of Twitter Moderators. Benefits of using Twitter moderators include:

• Assisting with a more centralised discussion point for specific topics
• Helping control ‘hashtag spread’ and the dilution of conversation
• Having a specific task to perform, their consistency and focus can raise the value of the tweets to those listening in
• Being able to cover several speakers and rooms at once with several moderators
• Pre-emptively organising and defining official hashtags on HashDictionary to get the official hashtag moving

Have you used Twitter moderators at your event or conference? What benefits or drawbacks have you found with this method?

HashDictionary.com - a Dictionary For Hashtags

Today I quietly launched a website called HashDictionary.com. It’s a website I thought of a while ago, but in a different form. The premise of the site is to help people understand what hashtags mean what. So a not so easy to understand hashtag like #beercupsnake can be easily understood with a simple link to the relevant page.

Users can create and edit pages to add new content or to update/remove old content. I intend this to be a useful website for people on Twitter and to help that question “What does #X mean?” get answered so much faster.

I’d love any feedback on the site, is it useful? Is it valuable to you? How can it be improved?

Tweet Books - A Twitter Experiment Update #1

Since the first book went out - and was never heard from again (probably never having been picked up) I have given out a further 4 books. Two were posted, one to Melbourne and another to Queensland where they have been for a while.

Book 2 and 3: Retrogrrl started with her tweet book (I think book #3?) and has subsequently passed it on to Northern Ireland - where we will hear from it shortly no doubt. Dramagirl has also received a tweet book and hopefully will update us soon with it’s whereabouts or who she passed it on to. These two posted books will continue to move around the world hopefully and grab more stories as they go.

I passed on two other books since then, one to Dan Milward of Instinct who has it in New Zealand as we speak. Haven’t heard anything from him about where it’s up to or what (hopefully it’s not misbehaving!) - but I know that he did have a dream lately where he was a spider. Maybe you would like to keep track of your dreams in case you get this book!

Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress had tweet book #5 - he passed it on fairly quickly I believe, I can’t quite remember the question I wrote on that one but it’s out there in the wild somewhere now. I think it was passed through hands here in Sydney but I haven’t heard a tweet from it lately.

Have you seen a tweet book? I would love it if you could take a photo and add it to this post via a link or let me know on twitter.

Five Lessons On Email Marketing From The Music Industry

I recently wrote this article about email marketing lessons to be learned from the music industry.

Email marketing is something which businesses do in many and various ways with varying degrees of success. Getting people to sign up to your email list, preventing email systems from labelling your email as spam, let alone getting people to read your emails are all steps that need fine tuning on an ongoing basis. With statistics showing a $45.65 return on every $1 spent on email marketing in 2008 it is extremely important that it really is a powerful way of growing business…

I took the top 15 artists on the Australian music charts and headed to their websites. Their website is a primary area for getting signups to their email marketing so a link or form should be obvious to find and use. So here’s 5 lessons on email marketing from the music industry… » more

TweetBooks - A Paper Based Twitter Experiment

A few years back I came across an exciting experiment/project called the 1001 Journals Project, blank journals were passed around the world by hand or by post and each recipient would fill out a page as their journal. It was a pretty big success at the time - and though I never saw the journal I signed up for I quite enjoyed watching the progress of it over some years.

So I have a small experiment of my own that I wanted to try with people on Twitter. I like to call it #tweetbook. Yeah not very original but you know, it’s descriptive.

Here’s How It Works

• A blank A6 book is given, sent or left with a Twitter user.
• A question on the front page is the stimulus for you to respond to on any blank page.
• Once filled in - let me know (@niphal) and then pass it on to a fellow Tweeter.
• Each book will contain a different question so it doesn’t matter if you them more than once.

Pretty easy huh? Well I dropped off the first one today at Pyrmont at a street called Experiment St and Tweeted the location via iPhone. Well wouldn’t you know the map showed up in Drummoyne. _Nice_.

But there’s a few more to come! Want to be involved? Well add me on Twitter or leave a comment and I’ll make sure that you know about it when there’s a new book coming out.

Book #1 has the question : Where else would you rather be?

Would you like to play? I’m going to be sending out books 2 and 3 soon - let me know where you are and I’ll post one to the first two people to respond.

Why Do You Use Twitter? (Collective Effervescence)

One of the biggest things I found with the TwitterAustralia survey was that people love just connecting. I think there’s comfort in the fact that people might care about something you have to say, even if it’s of little consequence. One of the reasons blogs are so popular I’m sure.

I want to thank all the people who let me know why they use Twitter - so many people are in it for the friendship and connecting with others. Twitter isn’t a place full of scammers, trolls and general knobs and for that reason it works at the moment. Here’s what a few people shared about why they use Twitter:

Fun, support, friendship.
(barbs1)

I love connecting with people, not just in my industry :-)
(Devar)

My manager encouraged me to do it at first, then I start to see the good thing about it, being able to connect with other people not just within the same industry, but outside as well.
(ignatiusw)

Keeping in touch with people all over the world that I would otherwise not be able to maintain contact with.

And stalking of course.

(MrPatto)

I use twitter for many reasons:

• Networking
• Driving Readers to my blogs
• It makes me smarter
• It acts as a ‘watercooler’ (gives me company - which is important as I work alone)
• It’s great for research as I write
• It’s fun
• It’s powerful (I recently launched a project on Twitter and had 10,000 people eyeball it within 24 hours)

The list could go on and on - I discover new things to love about Twitter every few days.
(Problogger)

Bruce Achterberg was one of the respondents from the TwitterAustralia survey and before answering the question “Why do you use Twitter?” he cleared a few hours of time* and decided to write this response… It was one amongst quite a few but I thought worthy of repeating. Does it resonate with with you?

I use Twitter to express myself in a way that shares value and inspires people to self-alignment. I do this by doing my best to honour my self-alignment, which sets an example and provides me with many stories and insights to share with those interested in making some sort of improvement in their lives or utilising their potential more effectively.

I started using Twitter regularly after I saw popular blogger and personal development expert Steve Pavlina using it, noticing what a great, synergistic vehicle for value it was. I had joined months before, but couldn’t envision a way to use Twitter that inspired me until later.

Primarily, Twitter is another way to express my purpose for being here. I’m here to grow and explore what it means for myself and others to be “strong” and effective in a holistic, inclusive sense, and I choose to express that message by raising awareness of often overlooked ways to put our strengths and talents to use in a way that better honours our massive potential. My primary vehicle for that message is communication, currently written and verbal, although I expect to explore many other creative avenues.

On a level others can more readily relate to, I also enjoy the direct and indirect benefits of Twitter, such as improved writing skill, the ability to measure stats and other metrics in a creative way to help myself more effectively provide value in a sustainable way, and also the ability to learn from what I write as I tap into the recesses of my subconscious and glimpse ideas that I was not yet aware of. As Anna Conlan recently shared with me, “We teach what we’re here to learn.”

If you think this message is long, you should have seen my writing before I started using Twitter! ;)

Twitter is a great way to start a rich, varied conversation—an exchange of value and energy—allowing you to connect with those around you. The interaction itself is intrinsically rewarding, but I’ve even experienced direct value, such as a recent synchronicity I experienced after reading a Tweet by Darren Rowse where he mentioned the “Thesis” Wordpress theme, one of the best premium (for-pay) Wordpress themes I’ve seen so far—a theme with a level of customisation, functionality, and on-going support that I (a non-coder) have been looking for to help me create a Wordpress theme that resonated with what I envision, without needing the coding skills of a ninja.

I think the main lesson to take away from Twitter is that there are many unexpected benefits from exploring new things and simply getting yourself out there. As Steve Pavlina says, “making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.” We’re stronger together, and Twitter is a great way to facilitate that connection and exchange.

Why do you use Twitter?
*Bruce may not have cleared a few hours - I may indeed have made that up

Twitter Australia : Does Location Really Matter? (Sydney Rules!)

Following on from the list of respondents in the Twitter Australia survey, I have sorted out a list of people’s locations. Some interesting results have come out from watching the survey respondents develop, there are things to learn about how Twitter works and how to get your message to far corners of Twitter.

When the survey started I was interested in where people said they lived. A contingent of Brisbane Tweeters were quite active, Sydney was unsurprisingly coming first but Melbourne Tweeters were lagging behind my expectations. So I announced this to be the case and Melbourne suddenly sprang to action quickly catching and overtaking Brisbane. It made me wonder - if with Twitter there are no geographic borders yet people still respond to a call of ‘Brisbane is beating Melbourne’ would (say you mapped Twitter relationships geographically) you see a large number of networks/hubs centred around geographic location? I expect you would.

Adelaide and Perth were also up there as you would hope, though I was expecting was a few more people from Perth to have responded as the Edge of the Web conference was on during that period. Twitter seemed quite active with #eotw so I thought people watching this tag would pick up on it with this announcement but alas, they could muster but 29 respondents in total.

What disappoint me most was Canberra. I expected a few more than 5 respondents for some reason (@malcomturnbull I wonder why you didn’t not respond? ;) ). @NathanaelB is a Canberran Tweeter who didn’t respond to the survey who I was particularly hoping would (though I didn’t ask him directly, wanting to test out the strength of the Retweets). Why? Because he is well connected and seems influential in the Twitter Australia scene and if I am right about Twitter networks still being geographically based - then his retweet could have seen more Canberran respondents.

Take a quick look over the people following you, and people you follow. Do they lean toward a geographic region(s)? Do you know who the network hubs are in your area or other areas? Comment below, I’d love to hear what you have to say.

The following are the location results as of today:

Twitter Australia

Recently I (@niphal) conducted a self-administered survey of what I like to call Twitter Australia. Personally, I find that Twitter although useful to network with - was not the easiest to use in terms of broad overviews of groups of people. I was unable to find a list of people around Australia that wasn’t a ‘king of the mountain’ list and Twitter’s search function wasn’t working. So I just asked a few things of people and said I would release the results. Thank you for participating if you are on the list, it has been great to see that not everyone on Twitter is a web nerd.

I hope you can use this list to make new connections and network with people, it’s not very high tech or web 2.0 but I hope it is useful. Leave a comment or tweet me if you would like to be added to the list.