Thanks to social media, following a conference from home if you can’t make it in person has never been easier. Over the years we’ve seen an incredible level of activity around MCN and we are well aware that the amount of content being shared can make it difficult for those tuning in from home. At last year’s conference, we had 600 attendees but over 1,200 chimed in on Twitter alone, sharing over 9,000 tweets over a three-day span.
We decided to switch things up a bit this year in an attempt to make following through Twitter more digestible for our onsite and online communities. Following the success of the “Hash-Dash Syntax” at Museums and the Web this past spring, we’ve adopted the concept at #MCN2017.
Sean O’Shea, Manager of UX and Strategy at @Cuberis, came up with the brilliant idea. You can read more about it in his Medium post.
As Sean said, “Due to the way Twitter’s hashtags work, only the text before the dash will be recognized as a hashtag. This preserves the integrity of the conference hashtag. But the power of this approach is that users can easily search Twitter for the full hash-dash tag, which will surface all tweets from that session.” Brilliant, Sean!
If you’re getting ready for #MCN2017 you’ve probably been looking over the program and you may or may not have noticed in the online conference calendar that we’ve added a session-specific hashtag to each session. You can find them in the bottom left of the session descriptions.
So as we celebrate 50 years of MCN (and 10 years of the humble hashtag!), we hope this helpful change allows you to get more out of the sessions. See you in Pittsburgh and online!