Neologism Watch: From Hashtag to Bashtag

I think Forbes' excellent privacy blogger, Kashmir Hill, may have coined (or popularized) a new social media term: bashtag. A bashtag is what happens when a company (McDonald's) tries to start a promotional hashtag (#McDStories) and users use it to hate on said company.

I can't quite believe it, but I think this is a first reference for this neologism. That is to say, I can't find anyone using bashtag in quite this way, although that may be more of a failure of Twitter's search functionality than the creativity of the Internet.

In any case, expect to see #bashtag appearing soon in slide decks on social media across the land. It is a very simple way to describe what advertisers don't want to happen.