Last night, like many others, I stumbled upon the HastTag #journchat during my evening stay at the Twitterinn. The first thing that was clear among all these common Tweets was they were all motioning you over to TweetGrid or something similar. A viral ploy perhaps, But an obvious need to help filter and keep up with the flow of these messages tagged with #journchat.
Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol. You commonly find a rush of these tags for breaking news, events, or even conventions which people are attending.
The #journchat hashTag was created specifically for PR and Journalism professionals in, what appears to be, an effort of having a virtual conference or seminar of sorts.
Another thing was quite certain after looking at the Tweet Stream for the HashTag, many were confused!
At any rate, the concept is intriguing. However, is using a HashTag to conduct a ‘chat’ or virtual seminar really the best way to approach this? I think it just might be!
Many conferences these days are now live streaming their events to the interwebs with sites and services like UStream. You’ll see these chat streams QUICKLY fill up with people ‘virtually’ attending and looking to connect with others interested in the event. The #journchat concept is very closely related to this, just without the physical event happening.
But just like any Marketing/PR event, you start to draw a lot of riff-raff and the message gets distorted. It may be too early call this one, but I am seeing what appears to be people just looking to gain followers.
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Comments ( 3 )
Brandon UttleyThanks for clarifying the mystery of #journchat! I look forward to following the discussions.
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Dec 02 08 at
8:23 am
Jeff@PRSarahEvans (http://wwwprsarahevans.com.) started #journchat last week.
It’s intended to be an open forum for discussion between pr and media professionals. I guess you could indeed call it a small weekly virtual conference of some sort, though it goes beyond that. It’s a little PR slanted right now but it’s growing. So far I’ve found it to be a great resource. Though as it gained more followers last night a few people did get a little confused as to “what” #journchat exactly was. Hopefully next Monday we’ll have some interesting topics. I expect we’ll see some expansion on this soon.
-jeff
FYI #journchat happens every Monday night 7-10pm CST (or whenever people stop the conversation)
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Dec 02 08 at
8:28 am
Mike TempletomMany people gained new followers as a result of last night’s #journchat because they were introduced to new people interested in the same field. Most people don’t follow each other just to be followed (unless you are a spambot).
There was actually a lot of great discussion going on yesterday about things like #mumbai, incorporating micro-releases into traditional press releases, using services like @MicroPR and discussions about the best way to pitch a story.
A lot of people started on search.twitter.com, but Tweet Grid actually provides updates in real-time and allows you to reply/retweet right from within their interface, which is why it was so popular last night.
I’m slightly fearful I may have flooded my followers’ timelines with a horde of #journchat posts last night, but hopefully they saw some value. It really was like attending a conference and chatting with new people, except we did it virtually.
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Dec 02 08 at
8:31 am