Akademik

n.

The use of a corporation's Twitter hashtag to bash the company's products.

—v.

Here's a cautionary tale for the corporate social media consultants of the world. Last week, McDonald's launched a Twitter campaign using the hashtag \#McDStories; it was hoping that the hashtag would inspire heart-warming stories about Happy Meals. Instead, it attracted snarky tweeps and McDonald's detractors who turned it into a \#bashtag to share their \#McDHorrorStories.

—Kashmir Hill, " \#McDStories: When A Hashtag Becomes A Bashtag: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/24/mcdstories-when-a-hashtag-becomes-a-bashtag/," Forbes, January 24, 2012

When it's done right, Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool. When it's not, it can be a recipe for disaster.

—" When hashtags become bashtags: http://digiknow.ninemsn.com.au/internet/internetgalleries/212456/when-hashtags-become-bashtags.slideshow," DigiKnow, January 24, 2012

New verb: bashtag. The act of hijacking a publicly-broadcast hashtag. As in: "man, the climatecamp has just been mercilessly bashtagged".

—Dave Stevenson, " davethelimey: https://twitter.com/\#!/davethelimey/status/22159405399," Twitter, August 26, 2010

On Twitter, a hashtag is a word (or, really, any sequence of characters), preceded by the hash sign (\#), that serves to group similar tweets. So people talking about, say, the World Economic Forum might include the hashtags \#Davos: https://twitter.com/\#!/search/%23davos or \#WEF: https://twitter.com/\#!/search/%23wef in their tweets. Searching Twitter for one of these hashtags returns all the recent tweets on that topic.

The first known use of a hashtag is the following tweet: https://twitter.com/chrismessina/statuses/223115412 from August 23, 2007:

how do you feel about using \# (pound) for groups. As in \#barcamp: https://twitter.com/search/%2523barcamp [msg]?— Chris Messina™ (\@chrismessina) August 23, 2007: https://twitter.com/chrismessina/status/223115412