From June 7-10, we’ll join athletics communications professionals at the annual ECAC-SIDA Workshop at the RIT Inn & Conference Center in Rochester, N.Y. With a coordinated Twitter effort, we hope to see the workshop’s reach grow exponentially.

As the organization’s Official Technology Partner, we’ll be tweeting all week long using the hashtag #ecacsida and we hope you do too.

What is a #hashtag?

On Twitter, the hashtag has been popularized as a way to search for tweets on a topic. Those searching for tweets can find all tweets on a particular topic, users can set up a stream of constant updates from a service like TweetDeck, and Twitter provides a means for integrating a search for particular terms in a widget (included below, right).

Why tweet?

You’ll spread the workshop’s impact. The workshop includes attendees from over 100 institutions, conferences and other organizations. Each attendee likely controls at least one twitter account with over 100 followers.  If each attendee tweets just once from these accounts, information from this event would reach over 100,000 people.

What do we tweet?

A coordinated workshop hashtag should offer value to workshop attendees and non-attendees alike. Provide snippets from insightful panels, offer your opinion from a controversial Town Hall discussion, provide a team photo of the champion softball team, let people know how much fun you had at the annual charity raffle or congratulate the 2011 award winners. Just think twice before firing off a twitpic from Wally World with this hashtag.

Examples from the 2010 ECAC-SIDA Workshop may have been:

• Can't get much better than this, a week of sharing ideas, seeing friends, making new friends on the BEACH! #ecacsida
• Learned a much faster way to cut an athlete out of the photo, game programs to shine next yr #ecacsida
• Congrats to Adrienne Mullikin (Hood), great job as #ecacsida President

Don’t wait until we arrive in Rochester. Start tweeting now. Set up your searches. Spread the word among other athletics communications professionals and administrators. See you there!