Short and sweet today.
Like Tweets are Short.
And Sweet if you’ve ever had this problem.
April 24th was our most recent Social Media Breakfast Fort Wayne organized by my friend Kevin Mullett. Kevin always tells us that the spelling of his last name is with two “t’s” to distinguish himself from the fish and the haircut spelled with one “t”.
There were over 50 of us in attendance plus plenty of others who were following along be following the twitter hashtag we have been using for the past 14 months #SMBFW.
Problem was that the hashtag was hijacked by a bunch of spammers.
There were so many and they were coming so fast I decided to see if I could change the hashtag to #SMBFTW . Added a t like the extra t in Mullett, but I was actually refering to an abbreviation for Fort (FT).
It worked.
Several others picked up on the new hashtag and the spammers that were clogging the #SMBFW hashtag stream were left behind, because they were an automated spambot.
Lesson learned.
What I really dug about this was that our merry little band of people cared enough about the back channel conversation to self correct in order to continue being social dispute the intrusion. A company might get upset and complain about the brand being diluted instead of recognizing how the community was ensuring continuity. #WINNING
Kevin, it was one of those things that had to be done as the number of spam tweets using the hashtag made it impossible for people in attendance to follow along and I’m sure those that were off-site were just as frustrated.
Like you, I was amazed and happy that we were able to redirect to a different hashtag behind the scenes as you were leading the discussion.