Affiliate Summit West, one of THE premier conferences on affiliate marketing, provided 3 days of rich, golden content. The hashtag and Twitter were premier online marketing tools used throughout the conference, making the information a gold mine for those who know where to search.
Are you interested in making money online? Pan for gold nuggets by sifting through the #ASWO9 hashtag. You’ll find tips, tricks, tools and insights into the lives of affiliate marketers.
Hashtag 101
A hashtag is a way of marking up a tag with the pound sign, aka a “hash” – #. People who send messages via Twitter can use a common term (keyword or acronym) to ensure all messages related to the topic of the hashtag can be grouped together for reference.
Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. 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.
#ASWO9 = Affiliate Summit West 2009
Attendees of Affiliate Summit West posted their notes, emotions, current happenings, and emotions by appending #ASW09 in their <=140-character tweets. These tweets into Twitter were sent through laptops and mobile phones. The #ASW09 hashtag grouped all these updates together for viewing in Twitter search for #ASW09.
This screen shot was taken on Jan 15, 2 days after the conference. (Yes, the conversation continues after Affiliate Summit West ended.)
- Twitter search was displayed on many projector screens throughout and during conference sessions. To say “the crowd was engaged” is an understatement!
- Speakers received questions while moderators watched Twitter for #ASW09 during Q&A.
- I panned for gold throughout the conference by checking my mobile phone and watching the stream of #ASW09 nuggets. (I was unable to take copious notes, because my laptop battery wouldn’t charge. The hashtag was my lifesaver.)
I posted a tweet to let others know about one excellent note-taker:
Read @VegasBill tweets for good ASW09 notes.
(I later met Bill and learned he is quite well known in Las Vegas and is a real estate agent and entrepreneur who keeps his followers informed about local Vegas news!)
The #ASW09 hashtag was also the method of letting others know about “after parties” and networking events.
Thanks to #ASW09, I knew where @rickgalan, one of my friends on Twitter and fellow winner of Copyblogger’s Gold Passes to Affiliate Summit, was during the conference. We met up a few times, thanks to this shiny Twitter hashtag.
