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.

That’s what Horn Group VP Susan Etlinger did earlier, for the PR/Blogger panel her company is hosting tonight. She’s one of several Twitter users who helped launch this hashtag simply by adopting and promoting it:

hashtag

Susan Etlinger helps launch a hashtag by using it.

And here’s the fruit that this kind of coordination can bear: Check out the #PRblog hashtag

…So: what’s a hashtag, and why is this so important?…

A hashtag is just a short character string preceded by a hash sign (#). This effectively tags your tweets — allowing people to easily find and aggregate tweets related to a topic, person, or event. For instance, for the recent Thin Air Summit, many Twitter users included #TAS08 in their tweets. Take a second now and check out that link to see how easy that hashtag made it to follow the action during and after the event. That’s much easier than trying to find and follow everyone who happens to be tweeting that event. It’s also a great way to discover new people you might want to follow on Twitter.

RESOURCE: The Wild Apricot nonprofit technology blog offers a great tutorial: Introduction to Twitter hashtags. This explains how to use hashtags in tweets, and follow them via Hashtags.org. However, you also can follow a hashtag simply by searching for it via Twitter search.

It’s essential to coordinate, promote, and use hashtags at least a few hours before an event starts. That way, your Twitter followers will know that the event is happening, and how to follow it. They’ll also know how to spread the word of the upcoming coverage.

Ideally, use the hashtag in promotional tweets a couple of times before the event — and include in those tweets a link to the event’s info page, if any, so people know what you’re talking about.

Then, just before the event starts, do what Susan did and post a heads-up on the hashtag. Then just make sure you include the hashtag in all your event tweets. The easy way to do it is to leave it as a snipped on your clipboard. But if you’re typing it manually every time, double-check your spelling before you post! A misspelled hashtag won’t do folks much good.

This kind of coordination would have been a big help at last night’s Changing Media Landscape panel at the Columbia Univ. school of journalism. Sree Sreenivasan assembled a stellar panel of media innovators, it was worth watching. (See Columbia blogger Greg Bocquet’s wrapup of the session.)

Columbia live-streamed this session on Mogulus, which provides a chat room for backchannel discussion. That is helpful — but it’s kind of a walled garden, and it also demands a fair amount of dedicated attention. Aside from the audio portion, that kind of live coverage is not the kind of thing you can have running “in the background,” to follow while multitasking — which is what a lot of Twitter users do.

Some people at the Columbia event or watching on Mogulus were live tweeting it — but they weren’t using a hashtag. In fact, they didn’t choose and start using a hashtag (#cml2008) until the session was almost over. Unfortunately, this meant that very little of their Twitter coverage was easily findable. It was also harder for their Twitter followers to promote this live coverage.

Why should Columbia j-school care about hashtags and live Twitter coverage of their events?

• Expand public discourse and awareness with a key community. Columbia is teaching new media, and Twitter is where more and more thought leaders, innovators, and new media enthusiasts hang out. These are the people who would be especially interested in panels like this — and who would forward to their followers (“retweet”) posts that resonate with them. Best of all, you get this benefit by requiring a minimum of effort from the community. They don’t have to go to your streaming video site and log in to participate in a small, closed chat unconnected to the rest of the internet. They just follow the Twitter hashtag.
• Gauge community reaction. People live-tweeting your event will do more than report on what’s happening — they’ll comment on it. They may even praise it, or criticize it, or raise questions. And other Twitter users may react to those tweets. If all or most of that discourse includes the event hashtag, it’s easy to follow later and get a sense of what people thought and felt about the event. This is often important after the event as well as during, since people tend to mull things over and debate.

What do you think about hashtags for live Twitter coverage? Do you use them? Got other tips? Please comment below.

Last night, after a day of mostly overcast skies in Boulder, CO, the clouds finally dissolved around 3am leaving a clear view of the total lunar eclipse. I was out in my driveway with my husband, who’d set up his whompous Meade LX 90 12-inch telescope, and was thrilled to see the moon “get eaten away” and turn blood red.

The most lyrical explanation I found of why the moon turns red during a total lunar eclipse is from this Science@NASA story: “With the Sun blocked, you might expect utter darkness, but no, the ground at your feet is aglow. Why? Look back up at Earth. The rim of the planet seems to be on fire. Around Earth’s circumference you see every sunrise and sunset in the world — all at once.”

I used that same explanation to my spellbound six-year-old neighbor, who (along with his mom) joined us at the scope for an unforgettable hour of viewing and discussion. He totally got it — including when I pointed at the ground to show him where the sun was: “Think through the earth,” I said. “OK, I can do that,” he replied seriously. He was quite taken with the eclipse.

Of course this morning I wanted to see photos of the eclipse from around the world, so I went to Flickr. I found lots of great photos from last night’s eclipse. Many of them include, in captions, people’s experiences of seeing this eclipse. Worth checking out. My very favorite is this one (you’ve gotta read the caption).

I’m finding that when something visually interesting happens, I tend to go straight to the photo-sharing sites to see first-hand independently produced images — often before I go to mainstream news coverage of the event. Especially with something like an eclipse.

The thing is, when you view an eclipse it’s generally a very personal experience. It’s not just looking out into space, but having a sense of where you are standing, and what the viewing conditions are there. It’s an intriguing personal connection with space — but it’s basically about two points in space.

In contrast, browsing Flickr the day after an eclipse lets you experience the eclipse through others’ eyes (well, at least their cameras) from wherever it was visible around the globe. This goes beyond the connecting of two mere points, and your perspective on the eclipse expands.

Worth a look.