Macon Phillips: On Twitter, join conversations, don't start them

By Suvi Chisholm:

Good advice from White House new media director Macon Phillips on how to use Twitter #hashtags in political campaigns. It’s better to join an existing #hashtag conversation then trying to start a new one.

In encouraging folks to rally around a hashtag, the White House is engaging in a technique that many people are looking at as one key part of the future of participatory media -- fostering a real-time water cooler effect by getting people to contemporaneously chat about video-streamed events.

One interesting logistics bit: I asked White House new media director Macon Phillips why the White House is promoting the generic #immigration hashtag already in use, rather than trying to claim something more proprietary like, say, #WHimm. "We're joining a conversation," wrote Phillips, "not starting a new one."

Check out the rest at techPresident.