It could happen to any of us. You’re planning an event (a BIG event that your bosses will love you for and that will leave attendees wanting more). The details of the event are all set (location – check, dates – check, sponsors – check). And then there’s social media…
How do most events (particularly big conferences, expos and festivals) choose their hashtags? With limited space (140 characters max) to express your thoughts in that tiny Twitter field, you best choose wisely and concisely what your hashtag will be. It was unilaterally agreed (though never formally spoken of) that the best way to choose a hashtag for an event is to make the hashtag the acronym of the event followed by two digits representing the year (i.e., #DF12, #ONA12, #HIFF12).
But, as one unsuspecting Event Manager at The Social Media Strategy Summit for Non-Profits is learning (the hard way), snatching an obvious acronym is not enough! What else do you need? One word: RESEARCH.
As it turns out, The Social Media Strategy Summit (@GSMIonline) did what most events do when creating a hashtag for their event — they used their acronym (#SMSS). The problem is that this acronym is also widely used by an account called @SororitySisters whose name on Twitter is “Shit My Sisters Say” (#SMSS) — a popular sorority spoof account that lampoons female sorority members and sorority life. As you can imagine, this account is college humor drenched in cuss words, sexual references and… yeah… that’s enough right there (The last tweet on this account was “OMG! You had sex with THAT! #WTF”).
The account also has almost 4,000 followers who respond to and retweet this account using #SMSS. As a result, this is what event participants at The Social Media Strategy Summit are seeing in their event hashtag stream today:
Tragic indeed (especially considering it’s an event for and about non-profit social media marketing). This will also effect their analytics (imagine the analytics on this hashtag showing that the time tweeter on the hashtag was @Sororityspeak). We can only imagine and hope that the fine event folks at The Social Media Strategy Summit will change their hashtag ASAP (it’s never to late to rescue a hashtag during an event!).
There are plenty of resources you can use to ensure that your hashtag is not being used by another event or Twitter account. Undoubtedbly, hashtags get rehashed (pun intended) my multiple events, but you can and should avoid this at all costs. When researching hashtags, check out WhattheTrend.com, Hashtags.org or simply do a search in Twitter to see the history of the tag you’re using.
A little research goes a long way. Happy hashtagging!
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