Firstly, Twitter chats are awesome. A great dialogue is made possible because such a wide variety of people can participate. And since the nature of Twitter is very open and public, you can just watch the hashtag and still benefit from the tips and conversations.
Some popular chats include:
- #journchat - long running weekly conversation (Mon 7-10pm Central) between journalists, bloggers and PR people
- #prstudchat – a platform for conversation between Public Relations Students, Educators and Professionals (monthly, time varies)
- #campuschat – connecting college-bound students, their parents, educators, and administrators (Wed 8-9pm Central)
For more info on Twitter chats, check out this blog post on Mashable.
Twitter is great for serendipity – chance encounters. However, hashtags and conversations are more structured, and can benefit from being archived to be viewed later. What if you want to remember the conversations you had? What if you want to follow up with certain people? What if you missed the chat?
Keepstream is a great solution for publicly archiving your discussion tweets, whether you save all the tweets from the chat or only the highlights. All of Keepstream’s benefits come along for the ride, including link previews, annotations, and embedding. The embed widget is particularly useful – most chats have a post-chat recap blog post, and Keepstream’s widget is the ideal way to incorporate tweets into it.
Twitter chats aren’t the only discussions that happen around hashtags. Conversations happen all the time spontaneously or deliberately with hashtags or keywords at their core. Some example collections on Keepstream:
- #LessAmbitiousMovies – They would have been easier to make, but definitely not as good. http://keepstream.com/JimEngland/less-ambitious-movies
- #KDMCinfo – Tweets during Will Sullivan’s multimedia workshop on mobile reporting tools and tips. http://keepstream.com/ModernJourno/mobile-reporting-wisdom-from-journerdism-kdmcinfo
- #PCATX – Conversations during ProductCamp Austin. http://keepstream.com/PCAustin/productcamp-austin-6-what-people-said
If you ever have questions on how to archive a hashtag discussion into Keepstream, reach me anytime at tim@keepstream.com.
An example embed: