Every Sunday night an interesting group of people gets together . . . except that we’re not really together, and (almost without exception), we’ve never actually met one another.
That interesting group of people are in a “Twitter Conversation Community.” What that means is that, at a predetermined time each week, a group of 50-100 people who are interested in health and social media will arrange to be on Twitter. A designated moderator will then ask a question:
. . . and the conversations begin.
Sound like a free-for-all? It is. At any given time, there might be 10 conversations going on. And the only way that things hang together at all is that all of the participants use a hashtag to identify themselves. If you’re asking, “what on earth is a hashtag,” you’re probably in good company. A hashtag is a unique identifier that allows you to aggregate a conversation happening between multiple participants – most commonly on twitter. Specifically, you add a “hash” sign (#) in front of an identifying code (like #hcsm for “health social media”).
Using a hashtag makes it easy to run a Twitter Search on the tag . And once you’ve generated a twitter search, you can run a live feed from that search into any feed reader. And that’s how all of these disparate twitter users can follow all of the action.
While twitter doesn’t allow for tremendously deep conversations, twitter conversation communities can be really valuable:
- They allow people with similar interests to find each other
- They promote conversations and the spread of ideas and best practices
- They form the basis for new communities that can work together for mutual benefit – whether that’s by increasing their collective knowledge base, crowdsourcing new ideas, or just through the value inherent in having an expanded network
The most significant conversation community (and as far as I know, the first) was #journchat, a “weekly conversation between journalists, bloggers and PR folks.” It was created by Sarah Evans, the Director of Communications at Elgin Community College. Over just a few months, journchat has grown to several hundred weekly participants – and each session lasts for three hours.
For anyone interested in participating in a twitter conversation community, journchat has posted a nice “how to” document on their web site.
Greg’s Want Ads:
- An index of Twitter Conversation Communities
- A new name for Twitter Conversation Communities, which is both too long and too boring. Although admittedly fairly descriptive.
Up Next: the Health Social Media conversation community
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