Sure enough, when I talk to a journalist who has just started on Twitter, inevitably the question will come up: What’s the tic tac toe thing all about?

Welcome to the hashtag. The hashtag is simply adding a keyword with the pound sign or hash (#), which does look a bit like a tic-tac-toe board, to a tweet. It’s an innovation that evolved organically to help people communicate better on Twitter.

The hashtag has two main purposes:

1. To help sort and organize content.

2. To help people communicate emotion or nuance in their tweets.

Organizing content

The idea here is that you put a hashtag on a tweet that shows the topic of the tweet. For example, in the rash of tweets about the riots in Egypt, people would use #Egypt in their tweets about that issue. 

Using the hashtag makes aggregation of tweets about that topic easier. For example, even today — weeks after the conflict broke — if you throw #Egypt into a Google search, you will get real-time tweets about the issue where people used this hashtag.

 Journalists, look for hashtags and use them in your own tweets. Here is how:

Searching for hashtags

Searching for hashtags is useful for journalists to help find what many people are tweeting about an issue, not just those whom you follow on Twitter. It’s a good way to follow the news through the crowd-sourced tweets of the masses. It helps sort through the barrage of information on Twitter if you are just looking to read about one topic.

Hashtags also offer a clue to what is popular at the moment, which might prompt your own reporting or coverage. If you keep seeing a hashtag for a certain topic, odds are that’s a talk topic as we say in the business.

You can search for hashtags through Google as I did above. You also type the keyword with hashtag into a Twitter search to find all the tweets on that topic, as I have done here for #CharlieSheen. It is important to note that you can type a keyword without a hashtag into a Twitter search, but you will end up with different results, as I do here for Charlie Sheen.

The beauty of searching by hashtag is you get the tweets in which someone purposely added a hashtag, so using this methods focuses your search.

Searching for hashtags is particularly useful for following a live event, like a ball game, public meeting, trial or a conference. Find the hashtag, plunk it into Google or Twitter search and read along.

I’ve started “watching” Syracuse University basketball games this way when I can’t make the game, and it’s great. I can read what the journalists covering the game are tweeting but also what random fans are saying, as well as fans for the other team. This really adds to the whole experience because it’s like having your own, personalized blow-by-blow announcers.

I also have followed hashtags to keep up on what’s going on at a conference I was not able to attend. It’s a useful way to find out the highlights through the lens of conference participants.

How to find the hashtags

It is important to make sure you are searching for the hashtag that most people are using for topic. Sometimes, it becomes clear quickly. When I was watching Syracuse University in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee stadium, I could tell pretty quickly that #pinstripe was the hashtag of choice.

But sometimes finding out what hashtag is being used most for a particular topic can get confusing. What’s the trend can be helpful tool, as it lists top hashtags of the moment. Hashtags.org is also useful.  You can type in what you think might be the hashtag and see what results you get or try several variations (#pinstripe, #pinstripebowl, etc.). Hashtags.org provides stats on how much the hashtag you typed in has been used recently as well as tweets that contain it. Mashable offers additional tips on using and searching for hashtags.

Using hashtags in your own tweets

For journalists, using hashtags in your own tweets offers many advantages. First, it helps your tweets on a particular topic get aggregated along with other tweets on that topic. For example, back to my Pinstripe Bowl example, if you’re covering the Syracuse Orange versus the Kansas Wildcats for the Syracuse newspaper, obviously you want Syracuse fans to read your tweets. They likely already follow you on Twitter. But you also wouldn’t mind if Kansas fans read your tweets that may contain links to your stories because it expands your reach and readership. Obviously, Kansas fans are unlikely to be following you already on Twitter.

So plunking in #pinstripe into your tweets gets you read by a wider audience than if you don’t.

Using a Twitter hashtag when covering a live event is particularly useful, especially if you are also tweeting other things at the same time. That way people can keep track of what interests them.

Using hashtags to communicate nuance

Another use of the hashtags is to add some personality or emotion to tweets. This evolved, I think, because computer-mediated communication in general can lack the richness of face-to-face communication. I can’t smile or wink or nod or use my body language to show I’m being sarcastic or I’m kidding in a tweet.

Emoticons, the smiley or frowny faces people put in a computer-mediated messages, are an attempt to circumvent this problem. The hashtag is, too.

People have started added commentary to their tweets using the hashtag to show irony or humor or just add some emotion. In a post that every Twitter user should read, Jessica Hische explains this use of the hashtag well.

Hashtags used to convey emotion, feeling, irony.

So why does a journalist need to use hashtags to add some personality to tweets? First, personality on Twitter is a good thing. Twitter is a conversation; it’s not about shouting “me, me, me.” It’s about engaging people virtually, and people who are interesting and funny are more likeable than those who lack these qualities.

Another reason journalists should use the hashtag to add emotion or personality is that it marks you as a Twitter native. No one wants to be the nerdy guy running behind trying to catch up. Journalists need to be leading, not following on social media. One way to do that is to learn to use Twitter well and do so.

Nothing marks you as a newbie quicker than misunderstanding Twitter basics. Twitter, I find, is a pretty forgiving community. So don’t sweat a mistake or two. But for journalism to re-invent itself as it really needs to, it need to radically change not just make minor adjustments, as Mathew Ingram points out in this very important post. “Getting” how to use social media is part of that radical change.

So don’t just dip your toe into the water, leap in. #andhavefundoingit

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Is twitter a magic bullet that will save newspapers? Of course not. The thing is. There is no magic bullet. What the newspaper industry needs to do to adjust to the changes in the media climate are similar to what an overweight person needs to do to get sleek. It’s not one thing: It’s a whole life change, a whole different way of thinking; and it won’t be easy. (But is really anything worth doing easy?)

With that said, I do think twitter can be part of that. It’s a tool that I find, quite frankly, very fun. But it also can be useful to journalists. This post is the first in a series I plan on how journalists can use twitter. It’s based mainly on how I’ve used twitter, as I cover parenting and children at a daily newspaper. (Want to check out what I’m doing, follow me on twitter.)

Part one: How can twitter help a journalist:

1. Networking tool: Journalists need people to tell them stuff, and the way humans are built, they are more likely to tell people they have some type of connection with than those they don’t. To me twitter is a way to connect with sources and readers in your community and on your beat. It’s a bit like chatting it up with the secretaries at the courthouse where you cover courts. You ask how her day was, how her daughter’s wedding went, and you develop a relationship of sorts.  Then when the mayor gets indicted, you might be the person she tips off.  So tweeting about what you had for lunch or that you’re heading to your daughter’s piano lessons are useful because they make the journalist a human being to those who follow him or her.
2. Getting Stealing ideas: The fact is if you’re a blogger — whether a journalist or not — you need to constantly come up with interesting topics to blog about in your niche (or beat, for us journalists.) Twitter is a way to read a bunch of other blogs and Web sites in your area in the same way you’d read a bunch of newspapers to get ideas for stories. I called it “stealing,” but it’s not — it’s getting inspiration. You’re not copying what someone else said; you’re using another’s idea as a starting point for your own blog on that topic. Twitter gives you a way to find out quickly what other blogs and Web sites are writing about. I follow a lot of parenting and mommy and daddy blogs and Web sites on twitter. Regularly, they will tweet about something they have written with a link; I read it; sometimes I blog on the same topic and link back to their site. (That linking back is a great thing to do, which bloggers know but many journalists don’t quite get. I’ll explain that more in a later post.) I have found out about hot topics this way and be able to get my blog into the conversation. MomLogic, a parenting Web site, for example, twittered about a study it did that found that married women hate sex. I read the tweet, reached MomLogic’s post and blogged about it. It became one of my popular posts plus it has the benefit of possibly gaining search-engine traffic because it was a topic that was buzzing around the blogosphere that day. (Again, I’ll explain more about that in a later post.)
3. Finding sources: I was working on a story about how to go back to school on a budget. I was looking for moms who are super frugal. How would I find that? Twitter helped. I had been following a woman for a while who had her own blog, Frugal Upstate. I could tell from reading months of her tweets, that she’d be perfect for the story. So I sent her a direct message on twitter and asked if I could interview her. Of course, I had to check her out like any other source, but twitter helped me find her.
4. Aggregating: Certain topics will really take off on twitter, and there’s something called a hashtag (looks like # and a word that’s related to the topic you are aggregating) that can be used to get all those tweets in one place. Why does this help journalists? There’s millions of people on twitter, but hashtags can help sort through all the voices to the ones you — and your readers — really want to hear. Our newspaper offers a hashtag for all local posts, so they go to one page on our Web site if people add the hashtag (#cny or #syracuse) to their tweets. It’s a quick way to see what others in our community are tweeting about, so it makes the newspaper the place for people to go to see what’s going on. Hashtags are also useful for specific topics. When that happens, it can give journalists a sense of what topics are hot — what’s worth writing about. For example, Motrin ran an advertisement in October about how wearing your infant in an sling causes back pain that you can solve with Motrin. Advocates for babywearing went wild; mommy blogs were spouting off about it; a  hashtag  — #motrinmoms — was set up. A co-worker of mine who is on twitter noticed the hashtag and let me know about it, so I blogged about the issue and was able to add the hashtag to my tweet with a link to my blog. Again, I was able to jump into the conversation and hopefully boost traffic on my blog by being relevant and writing about the “motrin moms” controversy, which was what people in my niche were talking about that day.
5. Breaking news:  The one thing about twitter is it’s quick. You type your “news” in 140 characters or less through a Web page or cell phone text message, and, boom, you’re published. That could provide lots of uses for journalists, I think, especially as more people join twitter. Say you cover courts and you’re at the verdict of a much-followed murder trial. You could soundlessly type “Joe Smoe is guilty” into your phone’s text message system right from the courthouse, and your readers would find out the news before anyone else. Of course you’d follow up with blog posts and a newspaper story. But being first is so much apart of journalism. Now it won’t work for everything. The Rocky Mountain News drew a lot of criticism when it “twittered” a 3-year-old boy’s funeral. That certainly was a mistake, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t applications for twitter. It also was used during the recent Mumbai attacks, and certainly some of the early tweets weren’t accurate because little information was known. But that’s the nature of the medium of twitter: It’s quick and connects you immediately with a story, but journalists still need to use other tools.

Next post: I’ll talk about how journalists can get started on twitter.

– Gina