The #AAS15 Social Media team has been getting a lot of questions about conference hashtags. If your goal is effective filtering of social media content when there are lots of concurrent events, over several days, AND you plan to curate content as much as possible, you need a simple, elegant, and reliable strategy. Here is ours:

1)      #AAS15 on ALL conference tweets (this is the only tag for which we are tracking analytics).

2)      #Suicide #prevention #suicideprevention, and #SPSM if you have room for those tags. PRIORITIZE #SUICIDE and #SPSM for increasing reach. Don’t use a lot of hashtags, as we’ll fragment audience, and reduce characters we can use.

3)      Whenever possible, use the LAST NAME of the speaker/moderator in addition to the regular tag. This is for single moderator or single speaker presentations/events. It will look like #AAS15 #Smith, for example. Additionally, when paraphrasing or quoting a presenter, use their last name to indicate whose idea is being tweeted/shared. A couple of examples. For a single speaker event, just identify the speaker (Smith: Social Media creates new #suicide messaging opportunities. #AAS15). At a moderated panel, you would identify the speaker, but tag the moderator (Foreman: Social media curation is a critical academic activity. #AAS15 #Smith). Consistency pays off if someone is using tags as filters to find specific social media content. It also makes good curation possible.

4)      If there are multiple presenters, then use a key word or abbreviation. Such as #AAS15 #Youth or #AAS15 #Risk or #AAS15 #Veterans or #AAS15 #SPSM. Do your best to influence other live tweeters to adopt a consistent secondary term. @DocForeman has created a secondary hashtag for all multiple speaker events w/o a single moderator. Make is short and intuitive

5)      DO NOT USE #CBT OR #DBT. These are commonly used hashtags for C**k Ball Torture and D**k Ball Torture. Just don’t use them. Ever. Unless you’re into that..I don’t judge. I made this mistake while live-tweeting a Linehan workshop and our Dialectical Behavior Therapy stream suddenly got very interesting traffic. MH people probably don’t realize these are popular tags for kink social media. You’re welcome.

6)      If you need a hashtag idea, I have generated a hashtag idea for every session of the conference. Just text me, tweet me @DocForeman, or ask…BUT in the end, if a group in a presentation settle on a tag of their own, that’s great. Social media is collaborative.

7)     If you are the social media team member in the room, you pick the tag. SHORT and EASY are the goals. Others may or may not follow along. Share the tag when possible by announcing it (in the room if possible, or in tweets).

8)      IMMEDIATELY curate every session you tweet in using both tags as filters…Some tags will be used multiple times.

9)      Curation in Storify has a best practice method. It needs to be done in the 10 min. following each presentation (or it is likely to be lost). AND, @DocForeman can’t do it alone fast enough for the increased traffic anymore. The best practice method for curating conference social media in our field goes like this:

a.       Title is the Title of the presentation, or when in doubt, “Dr. A. B. Smith speaks about BLANK at #AAS15.” Make sure you always include both the conference and secondary hashtag in the title. It’s important for Search Engine Optimization.

b.      The summary field is a brief description of what is in the curation. I recommend the following standard text: “Archive of tweets from Smith’s 4/12/15 presentation at the American Association of Suicidology’s Annual Conference. Opinions, except where designated, are those of individuals and not employers.” You can copy/paste that statement to make it easy. I recommend spelling out the conference name and including the date in all curation summaries.

c.       I will show everyone interested how to filter/import content, and notify/share content after you make the title and summary. Hit me up for a 10 min. tutorial, or better yet, let me teach you in the Pre-conference workshop.

d.      If we do this correctly, it should take less than 15 min. to do. It cannot wait, or it becomes a mess. If each person does their own, we should be good. If you don’t have a laptop to do it, then arrange for someone to partner with you in advance. Curating and tagging content makes it shareable and searchable in the future. All of our curations from past years and past #SPSM chats are regularly searched and shared. This works!

10)   Any other hashtags that happen are bonus, but it’s usually not helpful to recommend a lot more. It will confuse people and complicate filtering and curating. Trust everyone’s best judgement, and influencers should advocate for standardization and simplicity. 🙂

These strategies tend to mean the most effective/efficient use of time and characters. They extend reach, and allow for capturing and sharing content well into the future. @DocForeman has been using Storify curation strategies since 2011 as a beta user, and these strategies are becoming the standards in our field. Learning content tagging and curations skill puts you ahead of the curve.