Clearly, however, not anymore.

“Seventy-one percent of consumers say they post hashtags from their mobile devices,” RadiumOne VP Kamal Kaur told me yesterday. “I’ve even caught myself hashtagging in my emails.”

Hashtags help communicate ideas and feelings, the 500-person study says, help Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest users redirect their friends and followers to related content and help unrelated people participate in a larger social conversation. The hashtag was born in strictly geeky circumstances on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, a form of group messaging that arose in 1988) and made its way to Twitter in 2007 with now-Google employee Chris Messina’s tweet:

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

But with almost three quarters of this study’s respondents — 70 percent of whom were women, and 44 percent of whom were middle-aged — using hashtags, they’re definitely not something that’s confined to young, geeky, and, shall we say it, male culture.

Interestingly, social media users seem to use hashtags much more preferentially on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops, something that may be due to the built-in capabilities for doing so in many social media apps, Kaur said. Of respondents who say they use hashtags, 70.5 percent used them mainly on mobile, and 29.5 percent used them mainly on their desktop device.

Perhaps the reason for the high use is, simply, that they work.

“Fifty percent of respondents said they would explore new content through hashtags,” Kaur said. “People even use hashtags in Facebook, even though you can’t search by them yet there.”

People who see a hashtag tend to click on it, explore it, use it in their own posts, or even check out the person or brand that tweeted it. That’s something that people who want to share their content more widely, including online marketers, should keep in mind.

photo credit: mikecogh via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Despite the rapid success of mobile photography, thanks to great smartphone cameras and apps like Instagram, we’re still waiting for someone to finally figure out group photo sharing. Swirl, the latest app incubated by Betaworks in New York City, aims to solve that dilemma by relying on one of the simplest tools in social networks: hashtags.

Swirl’s free iPhone app, which officially launches today, taps into your Twitter and Instagram accounts to collect photos from your friends using the same hashtag (keywords designated by the hash symbol ‘#’). For example, in my feeds there are plenty of photos tagged #Sandy after the recent super storm that ravaged NYC. The app collects those photos into a #Sandy group, or Swirl, and also lets you favorite it to keep track.

“I was watching my friends use the same [photo] tags on a bunch of different networks, and I wanted a way to pull all that content together,” said Swirl founder Summer Bedard in an interview with VentureBeat. “People aren’t just tagging conferences, they’re tagging birthdays, weddings … daily things.”

Typically, when you use a hashtag on a social network, your post gets thrown together with all the other public posts using the same tag. You can also search for photos by hashtag manually on both Twitter and Instagram. By focusing specifically on hashtags made by your friends, Bedard says, Swirl can offer personalized and ultimately more meaningful, collections of photos. And since it happens automatically, you don’t have to go through the effort of searching individual social networks.

Some group photo-sharing apps have crashed and burned, like Color’s initial attempt at tying in location. Flock, another competitor, is also trying to bring together location and photos, but its technology doesn’t always categorize photos correctly. And it’s also yet another app that you have to download and convince your friends to use — something that holds back most group photo apps.

Swirl, on the other hand, collects photos your friends are already placing on social networks. You don’t have to convince them to learn an entirely new app. And since it’s relying on pre-existing data, Swirl has plenty of useful content to explore from the start. The app also lets you avoid spammy (or simply gross) photos, since they’re coming from your trusted friends.

“I want people to be able to access this data whenever they want and not have it lost in their individual timelines,” Bedard said. “I want them to feel a sense of connectedness.”

The company is working on adding Facebook access soon, but the big problem there is that Facebook users don’t use hashtags very much, Bedard said. Eventually, she also hopes to add the ability to follow collectors, or groups of people using the same tag. Swirl also organizes publicly available photos on its website.

Swirl is following in the path of other Betaworks incubated companies like Chartbeat and Bit.ly. The NYC incubator also recently acquired the social news site Digg, and it’s aiming to revive the site after a prolonged period of neglect from its parent company.

In an effort to rev up the social engines of race car lovers everywhere, eBay is launching an extreme Twitter conversation hub for the Toyota Grand Prix in Long Beach.

eBay, in partnership with social media experience generator BumeBox, is going all-in on social with an eBay Motors’ branded microsite that aims to bring the live and behind-the-scenes drama of the IndyCar event to viewers at home.

click to enlarge

The eBay racing page, which pulls in Twitter content with #ebayracing and other hashtags, includes official photos and videos from event participants, fan tweets and photos, a live leaderboard, tweets from the track, a Twitter-powered voting module for cheering on drivers, and social sharing options for site visitors.

“We think the needs of the consumer have changed,” BumeBox founder and CEO Jon Fahrner told VentureBeat. “The consumer wants a compelling real-time experience, especially if it’s from a premium brand, and we’re the framework for those types of experiences.”

BumeBox, the mastermind behind eBay’s Twitter-ific racing page, makes a sophisticated application that powers real-time social experiences for large companies that want fully-branded “Twitter parties on steroids,” live video experiences, and interactive events on their own websites or Facebook Pages. The one-year-old Palo Alto-based company counts 20th Century Fox and Marc Jacobs as clients.

For eBay Motors, already a sponsor of IndyCar events, the social media push is designed to make gearheads think of eBay for their car parts and accessories needs, Fahrner said. This weekend’s Grand Prix is just the first of several #ebayracing events BumeBox and eBay Motors are collaborating on.

“We want to make it so that the experience means something to someone at the race and to someone at home,” Farher said. The companies have even put the #ebayracing hashtag on a race car. “It may be the world’s fastest hashtag.”

And, according to Fahrner, the campaign should slip in nicely with the existing Twitter culture of racing events. “This is just a natural progression, a reaction to what was organically happening for racing fans.”

American Express is giving cardmembers one super compelling reason to tweet about promotional offers: instant savings at name brand U.S. merchants.

The company launched a “Tweet your way to savings” program today to encourage members to sync their AmEx cards with Twitter and tweet special offer hashtags in exchange for coupon-less savings applied at the point of sale.

Here’s how it works: An AmEx cardholder can sign in with Twitter to sync her account — a must-complete first step for savings. The customer is then eligible to tweet any of the current hashtag offers to receive savings that are automatically applied with each eligible purchase. No coupon, print or otherwise, is required.

Should you tweet with the “#AmexWholeFoods” hashtag, for instance, you’d get $20 back on your next trip to Whole Foods, as long as you spend $75 or more at the high-end grocery store before April 30.

“American Express is turning Twitter content into commerce by connecting Cardmembers to merchants and delivering real world value to both,” AmEx vice chairman Ed Gilligan said in a statement. “With the continued convergence of online and offline commerce, our closed loop continues to enable us to bring seamless, relevant ways to connect our cardmembers and merchants on the most powerful social and digital platforms.”

A slew of big brand retailers and popular national chains are currently running hashtag promotions, including McDonalds, Best Buy, Virgin America, Dell, Sports Authority, Whole Foods, and H&M.

The initiative reminds of us of the AmEx-Foursquare hookup, first tested at South by Southwest last year, that incentivizes check-ins with cash-back credits. The program is, in fact, powered by the same AmEx Smart offer APIs. The Twitter version, however, is one that packs a lot more potential exposure for participating merchants, but also demands a bit more social hawking from participating cardmembers.

Two of the bigger offers could be well worth one overly promotional tweet: Dell is offering AmEx customers $100 back on a $599 online purchase in exchange for “#AmexDell” tweets, and Virgin America is giving cardholders 10 percent back on a main cabin ticket should they share the “#AmexVirginAmer” love on Twitter.

Twitter hosted a live video Twitter Town Hall on July 6 by Twitter, during which the President chatted with the microblog service’s Executive Chairman, Jack Dorsey. (Note his fantastic posture!) During the town hall President Obama answered tweets made by users with the #AskObama hash tag.

The Boston Globe took samples of the tweets with the hash tag made before the event started, and compared them with questions asked by journalists during the past two weeks of White House briefings. The chart breaks the questions into subjects and the percentage of who asked what.

Let’s play a game.

A. Who do you think asked the most questions about jobs?

B. Who asked the most questions about congress?

C. Who had more questions about marijuana?

D. Who asked about immigration the most?

Answers follow!

A. 12 percent of tweets included the terms “job” or “employment,” while only three percent of journalists used the terms in their questions. This was the most popular subject for Twitter users, followed by the subject of the “deficit” with seven percent.

B. 24 percent of journalists asked questions pertaining to “congress,” as opposed to two percent of Twitter users. This was the most common subject for journalists, followed by “deficit” and “parties” (i.e. “republican” and “democrat,” not frat.)

C. Less than two percent of Twitter users asked about “marijuana.” No journalists asked questions about this topic.

D. 1.1% of twitter users and 1.3% of journalists asked questions pertaining to immigration. It was one of the least popular subjects.