#Nashville's #TechVille 2012 Social Media Cheat Sheet

Tuesday, May 15th is #TechVille 2012 in #Nashville! 

If you are attending Nashville Technology Council's 2012 annual conference, TechVille than you are about to find out why Nashville, TN has been named by Forbes Magazine as #3 on the list of the "Next Big Boom Towns in the U.S.". It's not because of our booming music scene, but because we have some of the brightest companies and minds in technology.

If you haven't already figured it out, we're kinda a big deal! (As if Google coming to town wasn't a clue.)

I am honored to be covering the TechVille conference as a "SocialITe", along with a few fellow Nashville marketers and fellow Social Media Club Nashville Members. We will put all the good content coming from the event onto the social networks for the world to follow along.

Here's a little social media cheat sheet of some of the topics, speakers, companies, and presenters we'll be tweeting about throughout the day:

Conference Hashtag:  #TechVille

#HASHTAGS: Teachers hate them, Marketers love them

With the rise of social media usage has come the popularity of hashtags. If you do not know what a hashtag is, you have probably at least seen it in an ad campaign, on a Facebook post, or even in a text or email (by the way, they don’t work in text or email).

Hashtags originated as a way to group conversations, topics, or events within searchable streams in social media. They are most commonly used on Twitter and Google +. I’ve seen hashtags on everything from TV shows (#madmen, #TrueBlood) to general slang (#swagg, #ohsnap) and the ever popular #FF – FollowFriday.

I recently had an interesting conversation with a teacher about how her 8th grade students are using hashtags. She told me students use them everywhere: on homework assignments, in general conversations, and even requested she accompany the lesson plans on the chalkboard each day with hashtags. She hates them because they are overused and misused. This could be a translation issue with youth. Her frustration is understandable.