Anatomy of a Hashtag Chat

If you’re paying attention to Twitter on Monday evenings, it’s hard to avoid tweets that include “#journchat.” What is this #journchat, you might ask? It’s a regularly scheduled conversation taking place on Twitter. Created by Sarah Evans, this “event” (which occurs every Monday night from 7-10 p.m. CST) connects PR people, journalists and bloggers. Notably, #journchat was the first of its kind — and has since spawned a whole genre of online conversations. (This is different than simply “tagging” a tweet with a number sign, which is done to help sort messages. Tweetchats are actually like very large chat rooms.)

Inevitably, every Monday, someone ends up asking “What’s #journchat?” — probably after seeing a rush of tweets with this tag in their stream. With hundreds of participants every week, the Journchat experience can be somewhat overwhelming. But, it shouldn’t be. In reality, it’s an opportunity to learn from some very smart people throughout the country and to expand your personal network.

To get started, you just need to understand the anatomy of a hashtag chat:

• Moderator — The person is like a host. Normally, it’s the chat’s creator … but not always. For #journchat, Sarah Evans is the moderator, operating the Journchat Twitter account. The weekly #socialmedia chat was founded by Jason Breed, but is moderated by a different social media thought-leader each week.
• Rules — Some tweetchats have general guidelines to make sure the conversation doesn’t turn too salesy or get off-topic. (See the graphic for Journchat rules.)
• Guest — To bring a different perspective to the chat, tweetchats sometimes include special guests who field questions from participants.
• Participants — Pretty self-explanatory, these are the people offering suggestions, asking and answering questions and engaging in conversation with the rest of the community.
• Spammers — These are the annoying people who ignore the tweetchat rules — instead opting to promote themselves or ask questions out of turn.
• Chat rooms — For the more popular chats, following the high-speed conversation is challenging. Luckily, there are tools to make the process better. The best one seems to be Tweetgrid — which lets user create different fields. I suggest creating three searches: your name, the moderator’s name and the hashtag.

Ready to test the tweetchat waters? Check out Arik Hanson’s starter list of moderated discussions, which includes #gno (girls night out), #smbiz (small business) and #ageop (age of opportunity). And, feel free to use the comments section to tell us about your favorite chats!

Tags: Journchat, Networking, Twitter

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