Mapping the Great Beyond: Identifying Meaningful Networks in

60 MAPPING THE GREAT BEYOND
An option is to consider looking at an organization’s relationship
with the key themes which individuals are choosing to discuss (where
they intersect with natural themes for the organization—I’m not
suggesting Dipnote should be rushing to comment on Armstrong’s
pasta). This in effect involves moving away from micro-broadcast or
direct message dialogue to becoming part of a wider conversation.
This can best be achieved through mapping the network of individuals
contributing to particular discussions through #tags.
Mapping #tags
“Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding
additional context and metadata to your tweets.” 80 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: #hashtag.
Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings”
on Twitter without having to change the basic service. 81 The hash
symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and
later from Jaiku’s channels. 82 Importantly for Public Diplomacy, they
represent what individuals identify with and what they want others to
know their tweet to be about. This is a narrowing of the search from
merely searching for a particular subject within all tweets; #tags
are based on the conscious identification with a particular group or
theme, rather than the potentially coincidental word choice.
Chris Messina wrote Twitter hashtags for emergency
coordination and disaster relief following the San Diego forest fires
in 2007. 83 This shows #tags in their infancy on Twitter, but even then
it demonstrated the power of being able to identify a theme/context
for a tweet that would allow other users to coordinate around this
point even if they did not follow each other. Rather than thinking
in terms of engaging with individuals, a useful approach would be
to engage with themes which the dispersed community decides to
discuss rather than hoping people want to hear what the organization
wants to say. This would provide a means to create the much talkedup
engagement rather than using Twitter to micro-broadcast.