Nate Riggs: Social Business Strategies; communication, social web strategies, & passion in Columbus, Ohio.

I missed PodCamp Ohio 2 a few weeks back.  It came down to a decision and I made a choice – work Saturday and get Sunday (Father’s Day) with Kaden or go to PodCamp and work Sunday.  No regrets, but I was bummed out.

Thank God for Twitter and hash (#) tags.

There were over 120 people that attended the event.  The organizes chose the #pco09.  If you are not familiar with hashtags on Twitter, this is simply a symbol used to “group” stream of information.  By using the # symbol and a unique set of characters, Twitter users can then search the stream of information using tools like search.twitter.com or even desktop tools like Tweetdeck and Seesmic.

Hashtags at Events
Using these tags comes in handy at events by allowing people to communicate with each other in real time, without disrupting the flow of the sessions and creating distraction. Some common users have been for audience members to tweet questions to the presenters, or even log the play-by-play notes for people who couldn’t make it (this was how I was following #pco09 from my home office and getting updates without attending the event).  Event organizers can even announce changes in the schedule or the presenters.  You start to get the picture – there a ton of ways to use hashtags to organize information flow when you have a large group of people talking about the same thing.

Making Noise & Trending
Crowds of people are typically louder than individuals.  Think about a recent concert or sports game you’ve attended.  When every one in the stands talks at one time, you hear the buzz of conversation.  If a rock band takes the stage or a player scores a touchdown or goal or whatever, everyone yells together all at once. This is important because the concentrated burst of noise can be heard for miles around.

That concept is the whole idea behind trending topics on Twitter. When enough people Tweet enough content under a common hashtag, the collective conversation has potential to rise to the top of Twitter’s global radar and show up on Tweetstats as a trending topic.  I’m not a mathematician, but the formula might go something like this:

Number of Users + Volume of Content Updates
Duration

Some examples of long-standing daily trending tags are #Iranelection and #sxsw, both of which are classified as events.

Trending produces Visibility
So how do you use this tool?  What does it take to trend on the global scale on Twitter?  As for hard numbers, your guess is as good as mine.  If you can figure it out, I’ll buy you lunch (yes – even if you are outside the Columbus Ohio area.   The truth is that we are all still figuring out all the cool things we can do with Micro-blogging.  To make things even more interesting, the possibilities seem to change every day, making it tough to keep up.

Back to PodCamp.  We know that on the day of the event, #pco09 trended for a total of 11 minutes of Twitter and was visible as a tag for the entire duration of the day in various content areas on Tweetstats.  Remember that roughly, 120+ people were  Tweeting to the tag at an approximate rate of 15-20 tweets per hour. (It’s important to keep in mind that there were rooms full of experienced and savvy Twitter users at the event.)

In the next part of this post, we’ll look at a few ways that you can leverage hashtags to have the possibility of trending your topic – even if it’s only for a little while.  Likewise, all hashtags are not created equal.  We’ll also discuss how you can structure the hashtag to get maximum marketing visibility for your topic or event, so that people get curious, and you get the click-through.

Stay tuned…