The Hashtag for CIAT events

Tweet, tweets. In Spanish, the official calque will be “Tuit, tuits”. The Royal Academy of the Spanish language, through its Twitter account, confirmed that “tuit” and “tuitear” have been admitted in the Spanish Realm for the next edition of the dictionary.

Some of us will like it more than some others, but we live in an era in which social networks have become important enough to be commonplace. Skeptics and detractors, when they are faced with the topic of social networking in a casual conversation, have stopped pretending scornfully that they do not know what it is. Now they prefer to state with the dignity of those who know that they go against the stream, “I don’t have them, I don’t care about them”.

Of course, these small publications on Twitter allow some to tell and others to learn personal things, which are sometimes very domestic, in 140 characters. For example, knowing if someone is on vacation in Berlin, if there is somewhere a new boyfriend or girlfriend, or if you have lost a loved one. The scope of these small publications and their photos tend to reach only a few followers.

However, it is also true that when a company launches a new version of its star product, when a law is being passed or amended in some Congress, when there is a new leader in a city, a country or in a church, when Nature shows its might… In the end, when bad things and good things that interest many people happen, hundreds of news channels, newspapers and newscasts report them, always with the specific nuances of their particular crystals and viewpoints. It is also certain nowadays that those events will be also reported by hundreds, thousands, and sometimes, even millions of people who choose to directly express their opinions, their positions, and their perceptions precisely through that medium.

During the last World Cup in Brazil, a game has been the sporting event most tweeted in history, with more than 35 million tweets. The number of tweets at the end of the party exceeded 600, 000 per minute. A quick search at the time of writing this post allows me to know that during this second, 7737 tweets have been generated, to contribute to the many more than 500 million tweets that this day will certainly produce.

Among such abundance, to identify a topic or a trend will be no simple task. We must certainly feel amazed at the technology needed to manage those volumes of information in such short time periods. One of the mechanisms used to facilitate the identification of topics and trends are labels or hashtags. Those labels have many purposes, including detecting the state of mind, the mood in a specific collectivity, but they help to focus a discussion about an event or a topic of interest for a group or community. An example can be seen if we look for the hashtag #BEPS

To facilitate the discussion on our events, particularly the General Assemblies and the Technical Conferences, we are proposing the hashtag #CiatEvents, which will allow all CIAT community members in general and particularly the participants of these events to tweet on various aspects. We invite the tweeters that will accompany us in Santiago de Compostela to use it for their tweets about the event, and our community to use it in the searches.

Greetings and good luck

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