FIRST Meme
 

I'm wondering if we could get FIRST more "on the map" and help spread the word of FIRST by having a concerted effort on KickOff Day to generate some social media buzz around the NASA telecast. Looking at Twitter, for example, the top "Tweet" at this moment in time has 746 tweets. I'm assuming FIRST will be putting out a tweet on kick off day, and if we had, say 1000 (or many more) retweets of it, we'd be on or close to the top.

Similarly, if a bunch of us all Googled/ASKed/BINGed "What is FIRST" or something similar on kickoff morning, we potentially could get a meme started. And, if enough of us changed our Facebook status on the morning of Kickoff to "watching the NASA Telecast of the FIRST Robotics Challenge" or something similar/better, it might register...

If this were to work, we'd have to have enough people on enough teams all encouraging every one of their teammates to participate in order to get the numbers needed to make something happen. Could be interesting! After all, we made Barbie a computer engineer!

Re: FIRST Meme
 

The twitter hashtag that we used last year was #omgkickoff. Even with a lot of us tweeting like crazy, IIRC it didn't make much of an impact, but it was interesting to see all of the tweets afterwards.

Re: FIRST Meme
 

I've actually decided to stick to the #omgrobots tag for kickoff this year and hope to be livetweeting over at @j_boucher.

Twitter is an interesting being, and I enjoy watching the evolution of the hashtag. Both #FRC and #FIRST are too overrun with other traffic, hence why #omgkickoff (and later #omgrobots) took off. Since the popularity of #omgrobots has spread enough into non-FRC areas, it's more impactful than changing it back for kickoff.

BTW, for those of you coming to Manchester to kickoff, the official hashtag for the city is #MHT (after the airport code). It's another case of overrun hashtags elsewhere, as #Manchester is primarily associated with Manchester, UK, #manchesternh is too many characters to be useful, #manchattan never took off and #manchvegas is just silly.

Re: FIRST Meme
 

*disclaimer - all I know of twitter algorithm is one article's worth*

The Twitter trends algorithm works by comparing past to recent activity, that is to make it on the front page you'd have to generate more present activity compared to past activity on the tags. So I guess having a new tag has a higher chance of making it to the trends on the front page.

*end disclaimer*

I'll join in to whatever tag is decided upon ^^. Would love to see more mainstream interest in FIRST :)

Re: FIRST Meme
 

#omgrobots, while it's pretty much the unofficial "official" FIRST hashtag, has been in use throughout the year. I think using a separate tag, even if it's #omgkickoff, would have a better chance of landing the Trending status, especially if it was never Trending anyway.

I also think we should make a concerted effort to retweet a tweet, and get as many FIRST members and supporters to retweet it as possible. TopTweets is a semi-automatic account from Twitter that retweets some of the most popular tweets happening at the current time. I'm not sure of the algorithm used to choose certain tweets, though, so there's a chance this may or may not work. But the exposure of the tweet to everyone's followers would at least be a positive.

Re: FIRST Meme
 

please use #omgrobots!!!!

Re: FIRST Meme
 

It has less of a chance of trending, though. If we're trying to get this at least close to a trending topic, then we probably need a new tag. #omgRobots gets activity almost everyday.

Re: FIRST Meme
 

I'm not following - how would a new tag have better chance of trending than an older more used one? I'd love to read an article about it if you can point to it, please.

Re: FIRST Meme
 

This info on the trending algorithm was posted in the official twitter blog

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/to-t...-to-trend.html

It makes for an interesting read

Re: FIRST Meme
 

Here is the important sentence.

Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases.

Re: FIRST Meme
 

Basically... you would all have to tweet about that topic at the exact same time... ie. 9:01AM EST of Kickoff.

As for 'tricking' Google into making it something that appears on Google Instant... It's pretty unlikely considering the volume that they receive, and if you set up a bot to just have it search over and over, it's very likely Google will just start to ignore searches that you do as it pertains to Google Instant Rankings.

Re: FIRST Meme
 

Notice I kept using "less chance", not "no chance".

Re: FIRST Meme
 

Something else besides twitter/facebook.

If you live in the CT area you know about Channel 3 and Scott Haney. He's our morning weatherman and does a lot of announcements for community stuff etc. I'm planning on sending him an e-mail close to kick-off to get him to just send a good luck to all the teams etc. Another little thing to get FIRST our there, even with the non techy people.

Re: FIRST Meme
 

Can I propose the tag #omg20yearsforFRC ?
Would be a unique enough tag for it to break into trends if we can get enough of the community to use it.

Re: FIRST Meme
 

I would like that hashtag...but I can't afford to waste 17 characters on it :/