Word Spy - bashtag

n. The use of a corporation's Twitter hashtag to bash the company's products.
—v.

Example Citations:

Here's a cautionary tale for the corporate social media consultants of the world. Last week, McDonald's launched a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #McDStories; it was hoping that the hashtag would inspire heart-warming stories about Happy Meals. Instead, it attracted snarky tweeps and McDonald's detractors who turned it into a #bashtag to share their #McDHorrorStories.
—Kashmir Hill, "#McDStories: When A Hashtag Becomes A Bashtag," Forbes, January 24, 2012

When it's done right, Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool. When it's not, it can be a recipe for disaster.
—"When hashtags become bashtags," DigiKnow, January 24, 2012

Earliest Citation:

New verb: bashtag. The act of hijacking a publicly-broadcast hashtag. As in: "man, the climatecamp has just been mercilessly bashtagged".
—Dave Stevenson, "davethelimey," Twitter, August 26, 2010

Notes:

On Twitter, a hashtag is a word (or, really, any sequence of characters), preceded by the hash sign (#), that serves to group similar tweets. So people talking about, say, the World Economic Forum might include the hashtags #Davos or #WEF in their tweets. Searching Twitter for one of these hashtags returns all the recent tweets on that topic.

The first known use of a hashtag is the following tweet from August 23, 2007:

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

Categories:

Marketing
Social Networking
Insults

Posted on January 27, 2012