Amybeth Hale – Research Goddess

Admittedly this isn’t anything terribly new, but I would bet money that most of you have never participated in a hashtag chat before! So, what is a hashtag chat?

First off, let’s define a Hashtag: it’s putting the pound (#) sign in front of a word or a phrase in order to track conversation about that word or phrase on Twitter. So for example, some of the most popular hashtags at the writing of this post included #iranelection, #jobs, #journchat, and #bachelorette. This means that a lot of the conversation being had was about the election in Iran, people looking for jobs, folks discussing The Bachelorette, and people participating in the hashtag chat, #journchat. Which leads to the next definition…

A hashtag chat is an organized conversation via Twitter that is followed using a hashtag term. The chats are usually moderated, have either pre-set questions or chat leaders, and usually happen at a pre-determined day and time on a semi-regular basis. Since these conversations happen real time, and in the public Twitter stream, they can be participated in by pretty much anyone who’s interested.

Here is a list of some of the more popular and best organized hashtag chats, as provided on www.wthashtag.com:

• #cmtychat – a weekly discussion about the business of online communities, Fridays from 12-1pm CT, hosted by @sonnygill and @bryanperson
• #journchat – a weekly conversation on Twitter between journalists, bloggers and PR pros, taking place Monday nights from 7-10pm CT
• #smchat – a discussion on the power of social media among active practitioners and strategists, taking place Wednesdays at 12pm CT
• #blogchat – a chat on Sunday nights from 8-9pm CT that was started by @MackCollier to discuss blogs and best practices

There are plenty of other topics, ranging from SEO to K-12 education to healthcare communications and marketing practices, and even cars and the automotive industry. I recommend checking out the organizers who have registered with What The Hashtag here.

I’d also encourage those of you in the recruiting business to check out the #talentnet (or #TNL) hashtag chat run by Craig Fisher and Susan Kang Nam. It’s a hashtag chat specifically for recruiters that takes place the last Wednesday of each month at 9pm Eastern.

Some of you may be wondering why I’m listing this as a “Cool Tool” and the reason is simple: large audiences discussing the same topic. This is like you attending an industry trade event. If you work in a particular industry or function that has a hashtag chat already established, it’s a great opportunity for you to network with these professionals. It’s also a great place to learn about a particular topic you’ve been interested in finding out more about. I’ve also noticed that every time I participate in a hashtag chat – I mean REALLY participate by following the topics and adding value when applicable (there’s a tip) – I typically gain anywhere from 5-15 new followers. And usually the new followers work in some capacity related to the chat.

By the way – if you don’t see a hashtag chat listed in YOUR industry, don’t complain, throw your hands up in the air, and say it doesn’t work for you Why don’t YOU start the chat – that’s the beauty of social media. You don’t have to wait around for someone to create content; you can take the initiative and do it yourself.

My Cool Tool Alert this week is 140it (pronounced ‘One-Forty-it’). Having been around since early 2009, this tool will help you condense your tweets into the necessary 140 characters to be sent. No longer will you have to sit there and try to figure out TweetSpeak on your own, or fumble around with going to another site, copy/paste your message, shrink it down, and then go back to Twitter. This neat little bookmarklet can be clicked and dragged right to your browser toolbar!

140it shrinks your twitter messages down to 140 characters by:

• Reducing words, removing extra spaces
• Shrinking URLs with unhub
• Exchanging company names with their StockTwits symbol

Check out their easy instructional video and see how to grab the bookmarklet. It’s as simple as a click and drag to your toolbar:

What you’re lifting from the site is a javascript bookmarklet that will sit in your toolbar. When you go to Twitter and type a message that’s greater than 140 characters, simply click on your 140it link in the toolbar and it will automatically shrink your message for you. Twitter will only shrink your URLs, and that’s only if your entire message, link included, is under 140 characters. Take a look at before the message is shrunk:

…and after clicking 140it in my toolbar:

This tool works with Safari, Firefox, and IE7 and above. Sorry – it doesn’t appear to work with IE6. Take a look and try it out for yourself!

A day late for my Cool Tool Alert of the week, but hey, yesterday was a holiday here in the States!

This cool tool alert will be very helpful for promoting webinars, concerts, networking events, etc. Calendar Tweet allows you to tweet out short links to events you create, promote them via Twitter, and gather lists of attendees. 

Created by Fredrickus Williford and launched about a week ago, this new Twitter service tool has potential! Some of the things you can do with it include:

• Tagging, sharing, and promoting events
• Use as a private Calendar or promotional event management tool for Twitter 
• Monitoring to see if your friends or followers will be attending an event

Calendar Tweet uses the Twitter oAuth System so you can login through twitter automatically without having to provide credentials.

A cool discovery is that when you create an event, the description area accepts HTML code, so you can post links and things in your description area. So, if you simply want to use Calendar Tweet as a quick service to re-direct people to an Eventbrite.com,  Evite.com, or Meetup.com site, you can do so.

You can also either publicly tweet out events or keep them private and then invite just a select group of people. Couple this with TweetParty and you’ve got a completely Twitter-ized event management process. For example:

Say I want to have a quick local geek get-together for lunch tomorrow. I don’t want to take the time to create a big production for invitations but I want to make sure I invite my tweeps. I set up a quick Calendar Tweet for lunch:

Notice I un-checked “Tweet Event” as I want it to be private – otherwise your event will automatically be sent out as a tweet through your Twitter account. When marked private, the link and event are still created, it is just not tweeted out through my account. It ends up looking like this on the Calendar Tweet page:

Once the event is created, you’ll want to go back into your event and edit it to make it publicly accessible, otherwise the link will not work when you send it to people (since it’s private):

Since I only want to send this to a few people, I can then access my TweetParty account and select which group I would like to invite. I have a group for lunchtime tweeters (it’s purposely small):

I then follow the directions for sending a group a private message, and copy/paste in the link to my Calendar Tweet event:

And as people decide to join me for this get-together, I will be able to see them on my calendar event page.

You can also add events directly from Twitter. Just send a direct message on Twitter to @cal_tweet (you must be following first). For example:.

“d cal_tweet Fordyce Forum social media session (follow #VegasRG) @ 6/10/09″

As an added bonus, Calendar Tweet will send out a reminder prior to the event to remind attendees and to help increase turnout.

A couple of things I noticed about Calendar Chat that I’d like to see fixed:

• The date/time selection seems to be a little glitchy; it doesn’t like activities scheduled for noon (changes them to 12am for the following day). You have to rig the actual date for a day early in order to get the correct date; at least this was the case at the time of this post being written.
• I would like an option to not tweet a public event automatically, or a link that can be sent to and actually viewed by select people for a private event.
• It would be great to have a place for people to leave comments when they decide to accept a calendar event invitation.
• I’d like to see the ability to quickly add a Calendar Tweet event to an Outlook / iCal / Google Calendar. Could we get some links on the site to do so?

Some other things you can use Calendar Tweet for:

• Promotional events
• Concerts
• Quick party invitations
• Contests

Give it a shot yourself and see how it works for you!

This is a great Cool Tool post because there is direct use for this tool in candidate interaction!

This week, I am featuring Tweetparty, a Twitter app which allows you to direct message multiple Twitter friends at the same time:

“Tweetparty lets you organize your twitter friends into parties and send direct messages to them…With tweetparty, when you login all of the people you are following are download to tweetparty. You can then create as many groups as you would like (ie. work, friends) and select the friends you would like in each group creating the party. Then through twitter you can send a direct message to any party – no setting up other twitter accounts.”

This is a fantastic tool especially for those of us using Twitter from a recruitment standpoint! Why, you may ask? Well, take for example if you have a new job that you’re sourcing for and you want to get the message out quickly, but only to a certain group of people. You can simply create a Tweetparty group of Twitter Friends whom you’d frequently notify about your new openings. Instead of having to individually send them a DM, you could get it all done at once.

To get started, all you have to do is create a group and populate it. Here are a few of the groups I’ve created for myself:

Say for example I want to ask some of my recruiting colleagues to help me promote this post. I would simply send a direct message (DM) to Tweetparty with a hashtag (#) in front of the group name, followed by my message:

Of course, I’m a firm believer in personalizing as much of your conversation as possible when dealing professionally with others, but I think this is a fantastic way for us as sourcers to keep any Twitter contacts who might be potential candidates someday informed of our opportunities. This can also be useful in asking a circle of friends to help promote a cause, or a blog post, or quickly inform members of a networking group of an upcoming event. The possibilities are endless.

Only a couple of complaints: I’ve noticed is that if you’re following a lot of people, Tweetparty disables the ability to view profile images. I would also like to see bio information for the Friends list as well; for those of us who are following a large number of people it would be easier to choose people to include in a group if we could quickly scan bios.

Over all, this would seem to be quite a helpful tool for communicating with a large number of people all at once. I suggest giving it a shot!