Interview With Canadian Startup Hashcaster

Back in June we brought you this story about Canadian startup Hashcaster. Hashcaster provides a curation, and measurement (analytics) platform for event coordinators to manage their social media graph. It really comes in handy when gauging the effect of marketing, press and media efforts on behalf of an event just about any size.

At Social Media Camp in June not only was Hashcaster used by the event organizers but they also received a “Coastie” for “Most Innovative Social Media Product or Technology”.

Event organizers everywhere are counting on social marketing efforts more and more everyday as traditional marketing has fallen to the wayside. Organizers need to be able to capture tweets, likes, and mentions and then aggregate them, and analyze them to make sure the cohesive message is getting across. They also want to know who their top influencers are and what kind of impact any paid social marketing may have had.

All of these things are why Geoff Clendenning and Paul Vet created Hashcaster.

Now social media dashboards are nothing new but this particular use case is. Hashcaster also takes into consideration that the social graph of a particular event is going to swell as the event draws closer. When you’re at a popular event, especially one with a social media focus, tweets, likes and mentions can come in a matter of seconds.

We got a chance to interview Clendenning about Hashcaster, check out the interview below:

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Toronto Startup: Hashcaster Receives Top Honor At Social Media Camp

I remember the days as a kid at Pine Forest Camp in Greeley Pennsylvania. At the end of the 8 weeks of sleep away camp we’d all gather around the Netsie Playhouse to see who won the coveted camper awards. Fast forward to 2012 and we’re not talking about a nice sleep away camp for jewish boys and girls, we’re talking about a cutthroat and fierce competition between social media companies, called Social Media Camp.

The awards at Social Media Camp are called “Coasties” and they were presented Friday night by Erica Ehm. The Social Media Camp is the largest gathering of social media talent in Victoria British Columbia, eh? (I couldn’t help myself)

The event received more than 100 nominations that began with a public vote and concluded with a panel of expert judges from around the country evaluating the finalists in each category.  The judges panel included: Jay Baer, Convince and Convert; Sean Moffitt, Wikibrands; Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD., hummingbird604.com; Simon Salt, The IncSlingers; Scott Stratten, UnMarketing; and Angela Crocker, Beachcomber Communications.

Out of all the entries Hashcaster was named the “Most innovative social media product or technology”.


In a nutshell Hashcaster is a Twitter and hashtag management platform and dashboard specifically catering to the event marketer. Think trade shows, demo days, forums, discussions, sporting events, big conventions etc, they would all benefit from Hashcaster.

Why? Because Hashcaster makes sense of the quickly flowing hashtags. It provides real time analytics for the hashtags that you’ve created for your event and captures tweets that often scroll to quickly across a screen, Twitter wall or smartphone, to make any real use out of them.

Trust, me if there’s one thing I know about, with over 100k followers on Twitter, is Twitter and hash tagging.

Hashcaster also makes it easy for you to manage hashtag variations. Usually leading up to a major event like CES, Comiccon or SXSW, the “official” hash tag and the “unofficial” hashtags get mixed up into a hodge podge of hard to manage tweets. HashCaster allows the event organizers to keep tabs on their major hashtags and variations there of.

In addition to winning the aware Hashcaster actually kept up with the event itself.

Referred to as a “Hashcast”, the platform curates in real-time photos, videos and stories from the event’s hash tag community as it trends on Twitter. It then pushes this content to an event branded web site  and advanced in show Twitter wall where participants and visitors from around the world can experience the event virtually.  Finally, the platform determines “who and what” is most important to the hash tag community; making highly valued content more visible and helping the community connect with top influencers.

Linkage:

Find out more about Hashcaster here

See Social Media Camps Hashcaster here 

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