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From Nielsen Homescan

St. Patrick’s Day (March 17th) is the Roman Catholic feast honoring Ireland’s patron saint, St. Patrick. The holiday is also an international celebration of Irish history and heritage. But you don’t have to be Catholic or Irish to celebrate – as they say, everyone’s Irish on St. Patty’s Day! So go put on your favorite piece of green clothing and take a look at some of these fun facts from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service:

• 40.7 billion and 2.5 billion: U.S. beef and cabbage production, respectively, in pounds, in 2008. Corned beef and cabbage is a traditional St. Patrick’s Day dish.
• 6.5 billion pounds: The amount of beef Texas produced in 2008. Incidentally, the corned beef celebrants dine on may very well have originated in Texas. The largest producers of cabbage are New York, which produced 584 million pounds, and California, which produced 528 million pounds.
• $35 million: Value of potted florist chrysanthemum sales at wholesale in 2008 for operations with $100,000 or more sales. Lime green chrysanthemums are often requested for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations.

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[Re-print from 2009]

Hashtags are a useful tool that help you to organize and share your tweets with others. Just like adding keywords to a Flickr photo, hashtags allow you to group tweets together with others sharing the same tag. The result being topics of interest that are easier to follow.

The use of hashtags evolved during the 2007 San Diego forest fires when #sandiegofire was used to identify updates relating to the disaster.

The hashtag #iranelection and Twitter recently played a crucial role in disseminating information in the ongoing controversy over the disputed Iran elections. Twitter has been so critical for communication in Iran that they rescheduled maintenance to occur in the middle of the night in Iran even though this meant Twitter was be offline during peak hours in the US.

However hashtags are not all political. Companies are using hashtags as a way to promote events and product launches in context, and also as a communication tool for remote employees to stay on top of relevant information.

Hashtags can also be used to share notes. For instance, conference goers can use a common tag so that all notes can be easily grouped together and reviewed by those present and absent.

Hashtag etiquette is still evolving so be sure to tag with discretion. How To Use Hashtags:

1. Follow @hashtags on Twitter. They will follow you back automatically, and your hashtags will be tracked.
2. Use hashtags to precede key words in your tweets. Be sure to check Hashtags.org to see if your topic already has an established hashtag.
3. Track the tagged conversations that interest you. Topics can be found via the search.twitter.com feature.

Valid hashtags are also indexed at Hashtags.org, organized by tag, and available as individual RSS feeds. Meaning the conversation can be accessed even without a Twitter account.

This article provided by Brave Media Internet Marketing Vancouver

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