5 Steps to Choosing a Conference Hashtag

After reading a few tweets today expressing confusion about a conference hashtag, I realized it would be nice to have some guidance as to how to go about choosing a hashtag for an upcoming conference. Here’s a step-by-step:

1. Pick a short hashtag that adequately represents the conference. If your organization is called “National Association of Student Personnel Administrators,” then #naspa would make sense. While student affairs/higher education professionals have preferred adding a year, there is evidence to suggest that including no year in the hashtag is more frequent throughout the Twitterverse. The goal is to pick as short of a hashtag as possible that will describe the event. You don’t want to cut into people’s tweets— they only have 140 characters available, after all.

2. Do a Twitter search of the hashtag you selected. If nothing comes up in your search, then do a little bit more checking: Ask your colleagues attending the conference and the conference organizers if they are aware of a hashtag for the event. You don’t want to duplicate effort. If there is no other hashtag in use for the event and if the hashtag you selected isn’t already in use, stake a claim. Send a tweet stating “I claim the #myhashtag for the 2010 My Hashtag National Conference.”

If the hashtag you picked is already in use by another organization, cause, or person, go back to step 1.

3. Contact the organizers of the conference and tell them you have claimed a hashtag. Ask them if they would please promote the hashtag to their members and conference attendees.

4. Promote the hashtag everywhere. Tell your colleagues who are attending the conference, post it on your blog, and send it via the conference/organization listserv, if any.

5. Enjoy using your newly created hashtag to engage conference participants. 

• Tags: social media twitter hashtag conference

I’ve been remiss in updating my tumblr

It’s because I’ve been busy with so many other writing projects. Also, I’ve decided that I’m going to move my blogging to a WordPress blog hosted on my own domain. It will be easier for me to maintain it that way. For now, a quick update:

I am happy to report that our Twitter research experiment was a success. I’m staying quiet about it for now because we are currently analyzing our data; however, our preliminary analyses are looking really good.

• Tags: blogging, twitter

How to Export Twitter Updates to Excel

I found myself in need of an efficient way to download entire Twitter timelines to Excel in order to conduct a thematic analysis of Twitter topics for our research. I decided to share what I discovered. Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/userid.xml?count=x

2. Replace “userid” with your Twitter username

3. You’ll also need to replace the “x” at the end with your total number of tweets which can be found on your home page. This will download all of the tweets in your user timeline.

4. If you’d like to download your friend timeline (i.e., not just all of your tweets, but the tweets of everyone you are following), then replace “user_timeline” with “friends_timeline.”

5. A dialogue box will appear that will ask for your Twitter username and password. Once you’ve entered your username and password, you will have a page of output in xml format. Save this file by going to File->Save As in your browser. I recommend using FIrefox because Safari doesn’t do a good job of saving xml files.

Mac Users: Here’s the bad news, you will need to use Excel in windows in order to import this file. I was unable to find a way to get Mac Excel to import the xml file correctly. If you know how, please post in the comments.

6. Open a worksheet in Excel and click on Data->XML->Import then choose the file you saved during the previous step.

7. Excel will show a dialog box that reads “The specified XML source does not refer to a schema. Excel will create a schema based on the XML source data.” Click “OK”

8. Excel will then produce another dialogue box that asks where you want to put the data. Select “XML list in existing worksheet” and click “OK.”

9. Voila! You will now have an Excel file that contains all of your tweets. Because Twitter is by no means a static medium, you may want to download tweets from time to time. In order to download new Tweets since your last download, find the id# of the last Tweet you downloaded (should be the third column in your Excel file) and input it into the ID field of this url:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/userid.xml?since_id=ID

Update 10-26-09: Currently, Twitter will only return 200 tweets at a time. If you want to download more than 200 tweets, you can download them incrementally by “page” with the link: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/userid.xml?page=x (the most recent updates are on page “1”). This application downloads your user timeline automatically: http://johannburkard.de/blog/programming/java/backup-twitter-tweets-with-twitterbackup.html

• Tags: Twitter research methods

Getting started with Twitter presentation slides

This past week, I was at South Dakota State University kicking off our experimental study of the effects of Twitter on student engagement. I taught multiple sections of the first year experience course, GS100, how to use Twitter. Overall, I think the week was very productive and I was able to get a lot of uninterrupted work time in (some alongside my co-investigator).

Here are the slides I used with the GS100 students:

Getting Started with Twitter

• Tags: presentation, Twitter slides beginner

Slides from 2009 Brunel eLearning 2.0 Keynote

Brunel eLearning 2.0 Keynote Slides

View more presentations from Rey Junco.

• Tags: presentation slides social media Facebook Twitter digital divide