Should we all agree a hashtag for each UK council in the run up to the local elections on 6th May 2010?
Hashtags are an easy way to find out what people are saying about a certain topic on Twitter. With one simple click, hashtags help you find all the recent views and comments tweeted about a given topic – or in this case a local area.
The hash symbol used before a word on Twitter creates a link to all tweets featuring the same tag
We’re looking for your opinions on whether this is something worth doing. We would like to work with you (as residents, politicians and councils) to allocate each local council area a three letter tag. In this way we hope to be able to help keep things simple, easy to remember and make it easy for you to find information on your local area during the local elections and beyond.
One area where this is already being used successfully is Reading – or #RDG as it has become known on Twitter. Councillor Daisy Benson and others have taken on the hashtag and its use is gaining momentum.
We hope this will happen all over the country and are looking to have a searchable database of tags for all UK councils in place by the end of the week.
Does your council already have a hashtag? We also don’t want to start from scratch with a new tag if one is already being used successfully by a council or residents so please let us know.
What should your hashtag be if you don’t already have one? Well one way might be to take a look at the national rail station codes as these are all unique three letter combinations which local people should (might!) be able to recognise as relating to their area (like RDG for Reading funnily enough!). Of course this system isn’t perfect, for instance many councils have more than one station in their area and their may be conflict in two tier areas with county and district councils both seeming like the best fit for a certain tag. But given there are around 500 councils and 2300 station codes, we’re hoping that with a bit of common sense we can work around these!
If not, check your local station code here and if it seems to fit why not start adding the tag to relevant tweets dont forget the # symbol as this automatically turns the tag into a link on Twitter.
Alternatively check TweetyHall at the end of the week when we hope to have our Twitter tag database up and running and you can see if you agree with us on what the tags should be. And if not – no problem, just let us know and hopefully we can get to a compromise (and if not, no problem, it was worth a go)!
Oh and one last thing – how do you feel about #LE2010 for the local elections hashtag across the country (so Reading would be #RDG #LE2010 for example)?
All thoughts welcome…
#NCL would work for Newcastle upon Tyne – it’s the airport code and a recognised abbreviation.
I’m really pleased to see discussion about this and think the #LE2010 hashtag is a great idea.
We (Derbyshire County Council) don’t have an election this year but will be watching how those that do cover it all online!
I’m not sure how three letter codes would work for us as a county where the unitary city council would want the same / similar. We are both abbreivated to DCC for example. For elections it wouldn’t be a problem as (I think!) we’re unlikely to have elections at the same time. However, the hash tags could become more widely used and then we have a bit of a difficulty.
Saying that we tend to just use #Derbyshire or relevant tags (such as #RoadsDerbyshire) at the moment. I’m not sure what we’d use as a specific county council tag as #Derbyshirecc is pretty long!!!
@Sarah – How about #DER and #DBY? I can see this getting quite complicated though. Whatever is adopted will need to be clearly communicated.
For the Fenham by-election last year, Newcastle City Council used #FBE09 – would people want to tag individual wards within local elections?
@Al – ward tagging seems like a good idea although we have 64 of them so in a full county election it might be difficult to manage in practice! Last year we found people wanted two bits of information – what the result was for their ward and what the result was overall. They didn’t seem interested in the detail of the other 63 results just what it meant overall.
Us and Derby (and I guess it is the same for many other county / unitary situations) would have to have different tags. Not sure what we’d agree on though!
interesting points – I guess ward tagging could work for residents as they can concentrate on their own ward – may get very complicated for officers!
I think the CC approach could have problems nationally as there could be a few – say BCC is that birmingham, bristol, bournmouth, bucks county etc.
It would be nice to have unique tags so people could click on a tag and be pretty sure they are only getting tweets relating to their council.
I’d be inclined to use #BrumCC for Birmingham, but the nature of tagging is that you can neither dictate, nor limit the tags which people will use.
Nice idea. Definitely like #LGE2010 and I’ll be encouraging those local bloggers I’m aware of to use that. As for local hashtags I think that may be better decided by locals themselves. For example, I know #LDC or #LIC would work well in Lichfield but they’re already being used so I’d propose something like #LDC10 or #LIC10.
So maybe don’t say “use this hashtag” but rather ask “what hashtag are you using?”