Later today I’m giving a talk at an entrepreneur’s group about how you can get more benefit out of social media by using hashtags. I’ve found that these can be exceptionally valuable tools to connect with topics and people. They also can help you make yourself (or a topic, organization, or event that matters to you) much easier to find and connect with.

I’ll be fleshing out these ideas in a later blog post. But for now, here are my main points I intend to make — Plus some resources I will to demonstrate…

HASHTAG MONITORING TOOLS

Hashtags are a radar screen to pick up early on trends, emerging issues, events, breaking news, etc. Business intelligence, spotting opportunities, troubleshooting, etc.

Use a Twitter client or service that lets your monitor hashtag. Twitter search, Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, Monitter, Twitterfall (article by Paul Bradshaw), and Twazzup.

Why not just monitor regular search terms, rather than hashtags? Use both, if you like! But search terms tend to be more inconsistently spelled or phrased and thus are more difficult to search for. Still, it can’t hurt. If I’m really into a topic, I’ll usually start my radar screen by monitoring several search strings (hashtags and not) and then hone in on where most of the action is. But when a community forms around a topic, one or more hashtags tend to crop up.

USE HASHTAGS ROUTINELY

Great way to get known as a go-to person on a topic.

Great way also to find smart, interesting, or important people on topic of interest to you. And to encourage serendipity based on your interests.

Popularity rules. Whatever hashtag is popular for a topic, use that. Like ad keywords: Use hashtags that reflect the perspective of the people you want to connect with.

Be specific: Easier to get reputation as the go-to person on a specific topic like #coalash, rather than a general one like #environment. Use both if you’re not well-known yet.

Try using hashtags in a sentence. Less awkward and more intuitive than jamming them all at the end.

If you see a hashtag and don’t know what it means, try looking it up in Tagalus or WTHashtag. If you don’t find it listed, @reply to the people using it and ask them what it’s about.

START HASHTAGS!

This is a great First search Twitter to see if it’s already in use. Don’t overlap current hashtags. Then register via Tagalus to make it easy for others to look it up.

Or tweet: @tagref: [#hashtag] is [definition, link]

More detailed listings: WTHashtag wiki — another good place to register hashtags.

If you have a company or brand that’s short, start & monitor the hashtag for the company name.

LIVE-TWEET EVENTS

Find out the event hashtag in advance, follow it, and use it for all your event tweets (including pre and post). Great way to get followers. They tend to stick around after the event.

Example: I recently called an event hashtag (#futurej) for a Senate subcommittee hearing on the future of journalism. Promoted it by searching for “future of journalism,” told those tweeters about the hashtag, and thanked people who used it. It caught on — About 900 tweets used it.

DELICIOUS TAGS ARE COMPLEMENTARY

For your radar screen, if you monitor a hashtag on Twitter, there’s probably a corresponding tag on Delicious. Use subscriptions function for tags on Delicious to expand your radar screen. My current Delicious tag subscriptions.

I really used to hate stereograms.

When they became popular in the early 1990s, they often reduced me to serious frustration and headaches. I would stare at them — glare at them, really — trying to will their embedded 3D images to leap out. Everyone else seemed to enjoy these hidden illusions with ease. But my eyes and brain stubbornly refused to do the trick.

Then one day, I realized that I was looking at a dolphin. I just glanced at the cover of a book of stereogram art, and there it was. I was delighted to discover that the image wasn’t “leaping out” at me — rather, I was “seeing into” it. I wasn’t even sure how I’d started to see the hidden picture. All of the sudden, and quietly, it just worked.

Years later, I’ve come to realize that whenever I’ve identified a key mission or purpose I should pursue, it’s emerged (very much like that dolphin) from the background of the world around me. I get a sense that some vision is waiting to be seen, and I prepare my mind to be open to it. Then eventually I see it, and it feels like I always should have seen it.

In contrast, whenever I’ve tried the top-down, primarily rational (rather than intuitive) approach to choosing a course in life, I usually end up not really wanting what I’ve been working for, or liking what I’ve done — which is frustrating and demoralizing on many levels.

I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, mostly because I’ve been spending more time conversing, research, reading, and journaling. To be honest, I’ve been searching for purpose. For a couple of years now — although I’ve been doing a lot of interesting work, meeting a lot of interesting people, and learning a lot of interesting things — privately I’ve been feeling like I’ve been flailing around, seeking direction and purpose.

Finally, I feel like the picture is starting to emerge. Here is the outline so far…

• Relevance: I think I can help foster a greater practical understanding of relevance — connecting the dots between information and people. This could, in turn, help people create automated tools that can spot and convey relevance. Imagine a “relevance engine” that could scan a seemingly random group of news stories or datasets and indicate not just which ones are probably most relevant to you, but explain how each is relevant.
• Helping people discover and share useful information. On this front, I think I could be most immediately useful by helping to free professional and amateur journalists from the constraints of traditional news organizations (most of which probably won’t be around much longer, and which have also succumbed to a toxic culture that directly undermines journalism and communities). Journalists have developed very useful skills, and I don’t want that value to be lost as this particular corporate house of cards collapses.
• Energy. My work and interests keep bringing me back to energy (electricity and fuel). It truly makes almost every other good in the world possible. Plus, the fragility, unevenness, and difficulties of how energy is produced, transported, and used around the world lie at the root of many thorny problems (war, poverty, drinking water, medical care, climate change, etc.). I want to directly support the development of more diverse, less destructive, and less centralized energy sources around the world — as well as more efficient ways to use that energy.

…That’s what I’ve gleaned so far from the patterns in the world around me and how they’re resonating in me. I have a sense that there’s a deeper purpose that unifies these three missions — but I can’t quite articulate that yet. Still, I do believe it’s important to keep my personal focus on practicality, not theory — on helping people in the real world. And I am passionate about all these missions.

I’m curious what Contentious.com readers think of this emerging outline for the next big phase of my life and career — as well as my intuitive process for choosing direction.

How do you figure out what you should be doing in life? Are you rational about it, intuitive, or both? I’d love to hear how other people wrestle with this kind of quest — or if it’s even a conscious effort you make.

Yesterday my colleague Jim Kukral wrote about why he’s decided to focus on centralizing his personal brand. He wrote:

“My biggest mistake from the past 7-years or so was not building my personal brand on my own blog hard enough, earlier enough. Some may wonder why someone like me who’s been around for a long time blogging (since 2001), only has about 600 rss subscribers. I’ll tell you why… because I never focused blogging and building my brand here on JimKukral.com until recently.”

That got me thinking about Contentious.com and my own “personal brand.” Although I have an innate dislike to the term “personal brand,” I’ll admit it’s a useful and important concept for people in media-related work and many other fields these days.

The simple reason for that, I think, is that these days it’s unwise to rely on any company, organization, or institution to stick by you. The only leverage most professionals have these days depends on their ability to find or make their own opportunities — which means they need to be known as individuals. not just as faceless functionaries.

Jim seems to gauge the success on his personal brand by traffic to his site and feed. For a lot of people and purposes, that’s perfectly valid and appropriate.

But personally, I see a lot of value in the hybrid home base/distributed presence approach to personal branding…

My own hybrid approach to personal branding means having an easily findable home base (this blog), along with being visible and active wherever the people I want to connect with are already hanging out.

I gauge the success of my personal brand by the overall quality of engagement I enjoy and the connections and opportunities that come my way because of it — not by measuring traffic to this one site or to my feeds. My brand is here, but it’s also at Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, and on Twitter, and in various client projects, and on e-mail lists and forums, at meetups, in personal communications, and at the many speaking gigs I do.

To be honest, I only check the traffic stats for Contentious a few times a month, and I don’t stress over them. I don’t really focus on traffic; this site isn’t about traffic. It’s about having a voice, demonstrating my value, making myself findable, and making useful connections. I think that if I became very concerned with driving traffic to this site, it might undermine the perceived authenticity of my efforts to connect with folks elsewhere.

Of course, I have the advantage of being an old-timer, relatively speaking. Contentious has been around since 1997, when there weren’t a lot of other options for publicly establishing a personal brand besides having your own site. Search engines tend to favor sites with staying power and sustained relevance, and I think I’ve managed to achieve that (with a few inevitable missteps, or course). For people who are really just starting to build their personal brand online, driving traffic to your site or blog or podcast is a more pressing concern, just to gain initial search and community visibility. (In other words, YMMV depending on where you are in your journey.)

…But that’s just my take, for my own purposes. I encourage you to read Jim’s post, and the conversation we had in the comments there, and think this over.

How do you gauge the success of your personal brand? Do you prefer the centralized, decentralized, or hybrid approach? Why? Please comment below.

A few days ago, it occurred to me that it might be nice if there was an online tool or service that would facilitate local “tweetups” (informal, spontaneous gatherings of local Twitter users). Right now, tweetups start when one person in a town or city proposes one — like: “How about a Tweetup at The Cup in downtown Boulder this afternoon, 2pm?”

…But this approach mostly works to assemble Twitter users who already know or follow each other. What about if you want to get together with local Twitter users you don’t already know, or who don’t follow you? Since I’m a big believer in serendipity, I’d love a tool like that. Knowing that there’s no such thing as a truly original idea, I checked on the logical domain for such a tool, Tweetup.com.

There’s nothing there yet, just a placeholder page. I e-mailed the domain owner to ask of their plans for this domain, and here’s the response I received this morning…

“Still formulating what to do with it. But likely to be a mashup of an existing system with the right tools which has an API. Possibly/likely to be upcoming.org

There will be a diffenet subdomain for each city.place : eg: london.tweetup.com, melbourne.tweetup.com etc.

Then I will do the same with seesmeet.com (for seesmic.com meetups)

Sounds intriguing — but it could, of course, all be vaporware.

In the meantime, I might suggest a hack solution for people who enjoy local tweetups:

• Go to Tweetscan — a tool that allows a keyword search of everything posted to Twitter.
• Search for: tweetup [TOWN] — where TOWN = your town, city, or neighborhood, whichever would be most relevant to locals.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed for results for that search. This will let you know whenever a Tweetup has been called.

Then whenever you want to propose a local tweetup, make sure you include the words “tweetup” and your specified geographic location (TOWN). I just did that.

If you like this idea, spread the word about this proposed syntax, and see if it ends up informing you about other local Tweetups outside your immediate social circle.

I’m sure there are other solutions — and it’s possible that this idea of mine may totally suck or simply not work. But I think it’s work trying out. If you have a different or better approach, please speak up in the comments below.