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Hashtags Don’t Need to Trend

Ask people to define a hashtag and you’ll hear “marketing or advertising tool” more than you should. After all, every billboard and banner has a hashtag and every Web marketer will tell you a hashtag is worthless if not trending.

Here’s the simple Twitter definition of a hashtag: any word or phrase preceded by the # symbol. Click on it, and you get other tweets with the same keyword.

Twitter wisely leaves the rest to our imaginations. In the hands of others, a hashtag has become so much more than a descriptor. It’s also a conversation starter, a word game, a form for irony, self-commentary, and inner monologue, as well as a powerful advertising tool. The hashtag celebrated its tenth anniversary on August 23rd.

Chris Messina, a Web marketer who worked outside of Twitter, pitched the innovation to Twitter founder Biz Stone little more than a year after the 140-character application’s debut. Messina altered someone else’s platform—irreversibly and for the better—with a simple stroke of the number (#) symbol. Not since the at (@) symbol has a sign on the keyboard moved so quickly from unpopular to essential.

I use a hashtag to convene the voices in my classroom. I teach completely online, outside of any learning management systems like Blackboard or Moodle, for the graduate interactive media program at Quinnipiac University. For seven years now, I’ve asked the question, can we create good seminar dialogue using online networks and written words only?

We can, and we do. In my class, a hashtag isn’t an advertising tool. It’s a discussion tool.

The course number is 506. The name of my blog for my section of the course is The Interactive Voice. The hashtag my students use to identify and step into my classroom—#506iv—is like a room number that gathers everyone together.

Moreover, it’s intentional gibberish. It’s not a common word or phrase someone else might utilize as a hashtag for other reasons. My gibberish is only trending for the 18 to 30 of us. Trolls may bother us occasionally, but we’re not a big enough audience to interest them.

That’s a better reason for authors to use Twitter: to start the small conversations that develop new ideas. Hashtags and keywords help authors find readers with similar interests who either add to their thoughts or argue with them to teach them something new.

It’s also helpful to follow what’s trending on Twitter and understand the present concerns of the larger world, but it’s more important to get away from what’s popular and focus on the specific and unique.

That’s how authors eventually create what’s trending.