By Richard Scarlett
While I realise that hashtag abuse is a well-trodden debate, I recently understood just how prevalent the little #s have become – and I’m not sure that I liked it. Having lunch with my mum a couple of weekends ago, she actually ended a sentence with “hashtag OMG”. I should probably point out at this stage that she has never used Twitter, nor is she a citizen of Facebook, which added to my confusion as to how she would even know what a hashtag was and why she felt confident enough to just tack it onto the end of a sentence without a second thought.
It turned out that she had seen this particular hashtag suggestion flash up on a TV show, remembered it and subsequently decided that it’d be an appropriate thing to verbalise. In a similar incident, I recently wrote #1 instead of ‘number one’ in a birthday card, prompting my seven-year-old nephew to ask me why I would hashtag the number one. The reason for both misunderstandings is simple – we use way too many hashtags, and not in the way that they were intended.
For organisations, hashtags can present very powerful vehicles for successful digital PR campaigns – or a one way ticket to an epic fail. Either way, we’re approaching a state of bombardment as it’s hard to go anywhere these days without seeing a business (or rather, their PR person) desperately trying to create the next big trending topic. In short, it feels a lot like forced fun – and I wonder how many people are consciously posting and sharing these company-sponsored hashtags. As we all know, most people prefer to create and share their own hashtags, and these tend to go viral much faster, whether they are born out of social media activism (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown, #BringBackOurGirls) or humour (#WhatJayZSaidToSolange, #FirstWorldProblems).
From a PR point of view, more organisations need to take this principle and run with it – because at the moment it seems that corporate hashtags are arriving late to a party that the cool kids have already left. Rather than obsessively hash-tagging every word in order to join at least one (no doubt overcrowded) conversation for a few days, social media campaigns need to be a tad more strategic and subtle – particularly as consumers become more PR savvy, sceptical and to some degree, indifferent. After all, the most impressive corporate campaigns are those that you fall for without even realising that there is a big brand behind them – Oscar selfie, anyone?
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