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Can an Organization Own a #HashTag?
A few weeks ago I was preparing for class and was reviewing the Emerson Social Media #ESM hashtag stream, when I suddenly got flooded with a ton of #ESM tweets that were not part of our class or even the Emerson community. At first I thought it was students from the fall semester, but I recognize most of their handles and figured this was something else; turns out there was a weekend course running titled “Experts of Social Media”.
Now I don’t consider myself an expert on social media, I experiment with it - a lot; I explore it from a marketing perspective in our Emerson Social Media class, but I don’t claim to be an expert - In truth I kind of make fun of self-proclaimed “social media experts,” mainly because there are so many of them and less one percent of them truely understand that it’s about building and participating in community, NOT about getting a million followers or relentlessly blasting out updates. (Click here if you want to see a social media expert in its natural habitat)
Being that I’m not a social media expert, I didn’t know what do when I realized that some other group was muddying up our #ESM Hashtag stream. I could have been conservative and wrote to Twitter asking for guidance, but the last time I wrote them it took almost two months for them to get back to me (something having to do with exponential growth). I could have gone full-guns-nuclear and launched the might of 60 Emerson Social Media students armed to the teeth with Twitter APIs at this other ESM. Instead I opted to fire off a stern, but polite tweet across their bow; it read “Thank you for pushing #ESM hastag = Emerson Social Media = if you’re not part of the Emerson Mafia you might want to find your own hashtag”.
In the end it took this tweet and the efforts of a single #ESM student on Jon Bounds’ blog to resolve the issue - Experts of Social Media are now #EOSM.
The interesting story here is not the battle itself, but as Jon points out: our “desire to own and organize” hashtags. There was no recourse for the Emerson Social Media class but to directly confront this other ESM using social media platforms. There is no ownership of hastags and if ther was how would Twitter enforce them? Twitter does not offer verified hashtag accounts and it provides no support for these sort of hashtag conflicts. While it may seem petty or silly to battle over a hashtag, I can now see why communities that rely on a specific hashtag get so upset when some else hijacks it. As more organizations and communities adopt hashtag use, they will develop a similar feeling of ownership over “their” hashtag the same way Emerson Social Media feels about #ESM and as a consequence, passionately defend it. It’s ironic that the hashtag, which helps like-minded people find each other and anchors an organization in the Twitter stream, can also be the source of conflict between online communities.
