The Future Place Blog

What hashtags should you use for your event?

One of the fun and interesting uses of Twitter is the way that people are using Tweets to share the excitement of conferences, allowing non-attendees to get a flavour of what is happening. However, I think that many organisations are missing a trick in their choice of hashtags, by choosing a specific tag for an event rather than using their general tag.

A good example of this is happening at the moment with ESOMAR’s summer academy. Today it sounds as though the neuroscience event is going really well, with plenty of interesting and provocative comments being tweeted. If the tweets were all associated with the #ESOMAR hashtag they would have reached a wide audience. However,, some of the people at the event are using the event specific tag #ESOWS, which helps people who want to see these tweets and avoid #ESOMAR tweets, but restricts the circulation of the information.

My recommendation to MRIA, AMSRS, ESOMAR, and the like is to use their main hashtag for all events, rather than use event specific tags, at least until the traffic levels using their main hashtag are so heavy that the event specific tweets are being lost in the general flow.

What are your thoughts?

 

Word 2007 and Changing Case

Many of you probably already know this, but just in case here is a tip about changing case in Word 2007. In previous versions of Word I always knew how to select the option to change a piece of text from upper to lower, from lower to upper, or from a mixture to title case. But, with 2007 I could not spot it and lived without it for the last year (laziness is a really killer of efficiency).

But today I was editing somebody else's prose and my patience snapped. All the headings were in upper case and looked terrible. I needed to shift them into either sentence case (first letter in upper, the rest in lower), or Word's approximation to title case (first letter in upper, all other letters in lower).

The first thing I found was the shortcut, evidently Shift-F3 with change the selected text through a cycle of options. Although I like shortcuts, they have to be for things I use frequently enough to remember them, and changing case does not fall into that category.

I then found that the option I had been looking for had been staring at me all along, on the main (Home) ribbon. The picture below shows you what I mean. The red arrow points towards the button you click to show the options, and the picture also shows the options you can select.

Clone Brush - What a lovely tool!

I am sure many of you will already be aware of PaintShop Pro's Clone Brush, but if you are not, it is a real joy. What the Clone Brush does is let you pick up some reference material from elsewhere in the picture and to paint it over something you want to remove. The classic example is when you want to remove graffiti from a picture of a building.

Below is a quick example of removing me from a lovely picture of a lifting bridge from a recent barge holiday.

Before

After

For notes on how to use the Clone Brush click here.