Thanks for posting this comment on my blog as well.

Hashtags can create an ad hoc community of practice or a channel for people in a field to informally share resources or conversation.

Tagging communities or unbounded networks that might come to life around a tag are not new. The Nonprofit Technology community has used a special tag, nptech, created by Marnie Webb in 2004. In those days, we were using delicious, blogs, and technorati to share.

Here’s an article and slide deck on tagging communities of practice.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/sets/72157594548229100/

The #nptech tag still continues to be used on Twitter as well as other places. Although this was before Twitter, the advice about what makes an effective tagging community still resonates and are applicable to effective Twitter hashtags

Some of the #hashtag communities are ongoing and unstructured like the #nptech tag community. Others are more formal, structured conversations that happen weekly at a particular time. #4change is a regular chat about social media change. Another example, although not totally nonprofit focused is #blogchat. #blogchat which is facilitated by @mackcollier and uses wthashtag to aggregate the conversation.

I think it takes more a unique tag. You need to publicize the tag and encourage conversation around the tag. Also, having weekly summaries that can distill the key points is very important when volume increases. It can also make the information accessible to others who don’t want to participate on Twitter that deeply.

I think using #hashtags on Twitter for filtering are great – but then you miss out on the people, interaction, and deeper insights.

Back to your comment about giving power to the viewer, I think that’s exactly right. After all, Twitter is essentially just a bunch of noise that only becomes useful when you sort through it. Sorting through the noise is essentially what you are doing when you select people to follow. Personal tweets are going to occur – that’s a given on a site like Twitter. I think the variables are whether the viewer has the option to tune them out (while still following you) and whether the viewer chooses to tune them out. I think #hashtags give viewers that option.

Side Note: If you don’t follow anybody on Twitter, but subscribe to the industry-relevant #hashtag feeds, you can still see people’s tweets about the topic. You won’t, however, see their personal tweets.

In any event, I think #hashtags would help make industry tweets more useful and open the doors to productive industry conversation and community-building.

Hashtags are great filtering tools, but they help followers filter rather than help user protect who sees what.

I think that throughout the course of this conversation, many have forgotten about the use of #hashtags and their ability to help solve some of the discourse over what type of twitter profile to choose from (i.e. option 1, 2, 3, or 4; humanizing vs. non-humanizing). Instead, I think we should be focusing our efforts on which #hashtags to create, standardize, and subscribe to across the philanthropic/non-profit industry. For those of you who do not know yet, a #hashtag essentially categorizes tweets from all over the Twitter network by topic – effectively sorting all the “noise” into relevant specific streams of interest. A #hashtag stream could theoretically consist of tweets from all types of Twitter profiles (e.g. pure foundation brand, foundations with personality, employees with foundation associations, and pure personal accounts). Therefore, it wouldn’t matter what type of Twitter profile you had – as long as you use a #hashtag in your tweet, people subscribed to that particular #hashtag will see your relevant tweet without seeing all the other “noise” in your Twitter stream. In this way, less attention is put on individual accounts and more attention is put on the #hashtagged topic of interest – which should be the focus anyway right? So in essence, those of you who want to have a more “humanizing” Twitter profile can have your cake and tweet about it too – though if you decide to also tweet about the important issues facing the philanthropy/non-profit industry, you can just #hashtag the topic.

After doing some research on Philanthropy411’s blogpost of the “90 Foundations that Tweet”, I found that less than 50% were using #hashtags. On top of that even less were using industry-relevant #hashtags. Below is a list of common #hashtags that are being used by the Foundations to “catergorize” their tweets into general areas interest.

#nonprofits
#nonprofit
#foundations
#foundation
#philanthropy
#grantmakers
#ngo
#humanitarian
#causes
#grants
#grant
#evaluation
#healthreform
#publichealth
#health
#hcan
#healthcare
#healthbill
#edreform
#education
#edtech
#STEM
#arts
#artsculturemich
#sustainability
#green
#energychallenge
#ecomonday
#waterwednesday
#nptech
#npecon
#socialgood
#sosg
#socent
#charity
#fundraising
#giving
#silentauction
#raffles
#nonprofitgiveaway
#charitytuesday
#volunteer

As you can see, most of the #hashtags listed above are really way way too general to be of any use. If for instance, you tagged a tweet about your Foundation’s performing arts program with #arts, your tweet would be amongst tweets about all kinds of topics in the art world – even tweets about Paula Abdul leaving American Idol. If, however, there was a standard #hashtag for philanthropy/non-profit art like #philart (stands for philanthropy art) or #npart (stands for non-profit art), then I think we would see everyone in this industry getting a lot more out of Twitter (e.g. engaging in conversation, finding it more useful as a social media tool). As a result, I see a need for the philanthropy/non-profit world to create, standardize, and subscribe to #hashtags. The sooner this happens, the sooner everyone can stop stressing about what type of profile to choose (humanizing vs. non-humanizing) and start communicating effectively.

And, interestingly, the posts that got the most responses were about how I was having a bad day and needed ice creamg from a great local ice cream shop.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment and insight. Your concerns are shared by others who work at foundations. One approach a foundation is taking:
-developing a social media philosophy that encourages participation, but provides general guidelines
-the philosophy is linked to the strategy
-having operational information that gets into specific examples (not as a thou shalt do x, but more to lead to understanding).
-hands-on training and provide resources to help raise comfort levels and understanding.

I would guess that’s because the bad things can could happen are more immediate (employee says something negative about grantee) where as the good things happen over time (foundation’s influence in their program areas grow as tweeting employees build trust and credibility with the public).

Glad you’re trying it out. Good luck!

I’m a fairly new program officer, and I tweet (@paultofu) probably from category #5, personal account tweeting primarily philanthropy and nonprofit info, with small amounts of personality.

I think the concern/fear for me possibly stems from 1) only hearing about negative consequences from the wrong tweets or posts – I haven’t seen any posts or news items that read “I sent this tweet and got a promotion…” and 2) I take my job and organization’s mission very seriously and do not want to send a message that might be misinterpreted. Since I work with a community foundation, there are a lot of connections to the work we do throughout the entire local community, and I am concerned about expressing opinions related to organizations or even topics that might be interpreted as influencing a funding decision. I believe this has kept me from fully embracing the personal side of things – but I’m working on it .

So I’ve started out with sharing information via tweets and blog posts – and am slowly working up to a comfort level around expressing more personal thoughts/ humanness as well.

My most popular post was about my 22nd wedding anniversary – combined with advice about how to pitch bloghers
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/09/22-years-ago-to.html

Kivi: I love the “don’t embarrass your mother” rule. It was Wendy Harman who said it to give credit.

I tend to tweet mostly work related stuff, but also share tweets that show my personality — something someone might hear or see if they met me face-to-face.

I think it’s really more a question of balance than of actual content. People are into what they are into (and not). Same goes with friends offline. The point is to share some of yourself, whatever that is.

So I’m in no position to tell people to be less personal. Frankly, I should learn to be more personal!

P.S. I’m guilty of cat-tweeting in the last week, but it was a very high drama event that consumed a lot of my time. I’ve also tweeted about food every now and then, although I’m generally annoyed when other people do it. I hope people don’t get too twisted up about what’s OK to tweet and not on the personal side. I think setting too many rules about the kind of personal information to include in a mostly professional profile (other than the “don’t embarrass your mother” variety) would be shame. It defeats the whole purpose: Be yourself!

There’s how this all links to the organizational overall strategy ..

Anyway, lots to link about

However, Carrie, I do have to admit that I still think of you as someone who tweets with an organization affiliation simply because you tweet about work related stuff and I know where you work (and it is listed on your LinkedIn profile).