brewery33

Stay searchable in 2009 

Think of Twitter as a loud room where a bunch of self centered people are incessantly updating us about the trials and tribulations of their otherwise boring lives. As we have all read, the Twitter community has the doors wide open and people are filling the room at a break neck pace. With more people filing into the already acoustically challenged space, the conversation becomes muffled and borders on becoming insignificant.

The caveat of Twitter is that it is a conversation, and lots of good information is passed from one person to the next. However there remains a “dead zone”, if you will, of potentially interesting figures espousing useful information nuggets that you will never see because of your non-existent standing relationship, aka “follow”. Or on the other hand, you might be attending an event that you would like to separate the conversation of the attendees from the lifestyle tweeters.

This conundrum has plagued the Twitter faithful. The only real solution to this problem has been to include a hash tag in your tweet (example: #brewery33isthebest). Now this is a fairly solid answer to the quandary of filtering the conversation. The catch however is the education of the people that will be joining your conversation. The guys at Techcrunch were successful in this venture by instructing their potential conversation team members to tweet a #TC50 at the end of their tweet to be included in the stream. This sounds easy, but trust me, getting people to comply with a rule en mass is no small feat.

What this hash tag will do is make the conversation a searchable item. I know that you are saying, “I can search any term from the Twitter servers and come up with relevant results”. While you may be able to return some relevant results, you will also find that you will return some not so relevant results as well.

For instance, if I want to know what is going on with the Stockton Restaurant week, I could go ahead and type in the search bar, Stockton Restaurant Week. Now my results are going to search those three key terms in any order within the tweets that are present on the Twitter server. I could place quotation marks around the search term, but then too, I leave out the people that choose to just talk about their lunch at Centrale (one of the participating restaurants) while neglecting to mention anything about Stockton Restaurant Week.

Now enter the hash tag, #SRW09. Short and sweet, so as to not steal much of your all too important tweet. This hash tag, properly implemented by the managing authority (listen up Stockton CVB) will filter the conversation to the people that are only talking about Stockton Restaurant Week. . Then once implemented our all powerful managing authority of the event, that we are pumped enough about to care about the conversation that will be taking place by its patrons, will place a little piece of code on their site to display the conversation. Not only will this be useful to the nerds like me that are actually interested in what people are saying on a digital medium full of narcissism sprinkled with information, but this will also be a valuable chunk of information to pass along to the participating restaurants.

As we move forward in this social media landscape these tools will become commonplace, but as we are in the infancy of this movement, we must blaze the trail. Rome was not built in a day, and we cannot expect this first attempt from a community that is not so quick to embrace tech, to go over with flying colors. A success would be if we flew like an injured duck. At least we flew. Techcrunch probably will be more successful than most at accomplishing a successful Twitter conversation filter, as their community does not know much else outside of a keyboard and monitor with a handheld device thrown in for good measure. Trust me, I know, because well, I could possibly be a member of their audience. This does not mean that we should throw our hands in the air and give up on the notion. Give it a try, the good old college try.

No one said blazing trails was easy, just ask Captain Weber. He had to convince people to settle in Stockton, while his middle name was Maria.