Hashtags, what a magnificently simple way to link together content in the noisy world that is Twitter. But what can you do if your skillfully created hashtag associated with an in-depth campaign is hijacked by some naughty scallywags intent on spreading mischief and mayhem?

McDonald's has been in the press this week after their #McDonaldsStories tag was picked up by users to spread their horror-story experiences at the restaurant chain. McDonald's, a company not without its fair share of detractors, was perhaps a little naive to think that members of the social audience wouldn't jump on this opportunity to pan the brand. Sticking with its first hashtag, #MeetTheFarmers, may have been a better idea.

This week, our #BLDmemories tag started being associated with some rather unsavoury content -- perhaps not intentionally -- by the specific Twitter users involved, but it’s not something we want our B2B audience to be associating with our Olympics content. So, we've taken the decision to change the hashtag partway through the campaign.

Fortunately, it's still early in the campaign and we don't have much of our own content associated with the original tag, so it was a fairly easy decision to take. If it had been later in the campaign, we would have had to weigh exactly how damaging the rogue tweets would have been within a sea of Building tweets.

Hashtags can also attract the spammers, people who'll jump on your popular hashtag to promote their own products or services. This is something you'll see a lot around exhibitions and big public events. And yes, it's very temping, and yes, it gets your message and brand seen; however, social media is like real life -- no one likes people who don't play by the rules and try to push themselves to the front of the queue. In other words, this is massively damaging to the spammer brand, so just don't do it. But the good news is, this kind of behaviour is less damaging to your hashtag -- at least it means you're popular -- and Twitter users generally ignore these messages.

The key takeaways from this are:

• Check whether the hashtag you want to use is being associated with anything else.
• Make it as non-generic as possible to avoid anyone else thinking of it halfway through your campaign.
• Choose a tag that is closely aligned with your product so it's easy for users to identify as being linked with you.
• If you've got a lot of disgruntled customers out there, don't invite them to #telltheirstories.

When news of the telephone reached England over one hundred years ago, the chief engineer of the Post Office was asked whether this new invention would be of any practical value. He gave the reply: "No, sir. The Americans have need of the telephone -- but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys”.

Fast forward nearly a century and a half, and the internet has fundamentally altered the way we interact with people across the globe. The social media evolution we're now witnessing in communication has given us the opportunity to participate in the largest experiment the world has ever seen – the chance to engage, collaborate and innovate with our customers in a virtual space.  

However today’s companies are split between the Alexander Bells and the chief engineers of this world – whether we have the foresight to embrace these new communication channels and harness them for the benefit of our businesses, or simply believe that what we’ve got used to doing is enough.

That’s not to say that social media is some kind of silver bullet,  to quote Avinash Kaushik, Analytic Evangelist at Google, it’s “like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is a surprise it’s not better”. We’re not even close to fully understanding what impact it’s going to have on the way we work in the future, but that doesn’t mean this is a channel we can safely ignore.

Social media does have the potential to alter the very fabric of the way we interact with our customers, develop our products, expand into new markets, and attract potential clients. We are starting to make significant inroads through our Networks, groups and social media accounts, but to drive these developments forward we all need to embrace this culture shift in order to stay flexible, innovative and engaged with our customers, clients and markets. Surely that just makes good business sense whether or not we can foresee the precise future benefit? 

I was fortunate to be able to visit TFM&A in London last week and squeeze myself into a couple of the keynote sessions: Cisco and Facebook. Here are my highlights...

My Cisco Highlights

With Emma Roffey, Director, Communications & Digital Marketing, Cisco Europe

• Social media means we’re no longer business to business, we’re business to people. It means we can no longer be passive in the way we were with traditional media and marketing
• Cisco's social policy: The central hub of the business decides the core policy/governance. The local level businesses decide on the best strategy for their market
• “Just because it’s social doesn’t mean it’s casual”
• All Cisco’s events incorporate virtual. For example, Cisco Live Europe,  a hybrid event, sees its virtual platform getting a 20-25% uptake in comparison with the live audience. www.ciscolive.com/europe/

The BIG Ideas:

Transmedia engagement:

(I had to look this one up) “Transmedia is not that new of a concept, but the emergence of today’s social and mobile networking technologies, combined with the myriad of entry points to brand messaging, meaning that transmedia storytelling should be central to every marketing effort, online or otherwise.”

www.ploked.com/2010/03/24/the-world-is-f... : “This blending of the digital and real world will fall under the realm of transmedia, not social media. Social media will soon be seen “like air,” as envisioned by Twitter’s founders, and as a small piece of an overarching digital strategy that focuses on storytelling and engagement at all consumer entry points.”

As someone who uses social media throughout the day, I found this concept of blending really interesting – and we’re seeing it more and more as social develops into a more integrated part of media.

Using Social for Enterprise Development:

• Cisco’s Net Pro Community – A Peer-2-peer customer community which has created a $61 million annual cost saving for the company and a 70% call avoidance for support. It ‘utilises the wisdom of the crowd’ supportforums.cisco.com/community/netpro

• The Cisco i-Prize www.cisco.com/web/solutions/iprize/index... and Cisco i-Zone www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p... . Using social for internal innovation and new ideas and development.

• Cisco social miner – their own social media listening tool. As well as capturing the event tags, it also captures non specific tags for spelling mistakes, other any possibilities. www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11349/ind...

Networked Enterprises:

This was the most interesting part of the presentation for me as it was about the Cisco IWE (Integrated Workforce Experience, or Facebook for Enterprise) – their version of the Wiki sharing space we have at UBM. One of the top level stats presented was that the IWE has resulted in a 80% reduction in internal email.

We were given some examples of what the IWE offers: An individual calendar of your projects, you can who’s online –and how they want to be contacted, you can view your targets, and put yourself forward for projects even if you’re not in the team. The IWE streams meetings live  and you can see what people are saying on a Twitter-type stream up the side, you can see who’s online from each office around the world and engage them in private chat.

There’s a case study about their efforts here: www.cisco.com/web/about/ciscoitatwork/co...

There’s also a fantastic McKinsey report on networked enterprises here: www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_rise_of_th...

But it says: “A new class of company is emerging—one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners, and suppliers. We call this new kind of company the networked enterprise. Results from our analysis of proprietary survey data show that the Web 2.0 use of these companies is significantly improving their reported performance. In fact, our data show that fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.”

Cisco are doing this now – and our Wiki offers us the potential to do the same, to really embrace Web 2.0 technologies to drive development, innovation and revenue.

My Facebook Highlights

With Stephen Haines, UK Commercial Director, Facebook

• We’re now discovering our information from what our friends are doing rather than through search engine listings
• Social media offers companies an exciting way to tap into consumer insight for your next product.
• In utilising social channels, your message can be spread virally through the social graph 
• On Facebook, when an advert has a social context – i.e. a friend has liked it, it has a 68% lift in recall and a 2 x increase in message awareness
• A few companies have set up e-commerce apps on their pages –Pampers is one – so can sell directly to their customers via this platform
• General Motors have built Facebook technology into a car which reads your status updates to you
• Social isn’t going away

Also:  Have a look at Facebook Plugins – A good example of a company using this is the Levis website. When you sign into the Levi’s site using your Facebook details you can see your friend’s birthdays, what jeans they like, and more. It brings sharing to your website and gets shared via the Facebook social graph. developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/

Innovations: Facebook Places – offers for delegates? www.facebook.com/places/