You can’t watch TV these days without hearing about Twitter, the ‘micro-blogging tool’ that allows you to communicate with people in 140 characters or less.

No matter what stage of The 5 stages of Twitter Acceptance you are currently in, you may or may not be aware of a very powerful way to take advantage of Twitter: #Hashtags.

Hashtags were created to create groupings on Twitter.  Think of it as the “Subject” line on an e-mail message.  They’re normally appended at the end of a tweet to indicate what a tweet is about.

For example, we’re attending the NACCE conference next week in Chicago.  NACCE uses the hashtag #nacce7 for this conference so anyone tweeting about that conference should append #nacce7 to the end of their tweet.  Such as:

Hashtags are a great way for conference members to quickly see what others are tweeting about a conference.  Simply do a Twitter search for the hashtag you’re looking for.  You can also find a list of popular hashtags on the hashtags website.

Yesterday we had the opportunity to run a fantastic webinar with Aaron Kahlow of Online Marketing Connect.

The webinar was entitled Stop Tweeting. Start Executing and almost 100 people around the world joined us for the event.

It was a great hour-long webinar with a ton of takeaways. Feedback has been fantastic.

We’ve embedded the recording of the webinar in the upper right, and you can see both presentations from Aaron and Brad below.

What did we miss?

I recently gave a free webinar on Achieving Twitter Success with JR Cohen of The Coffee Groundz, a company that makes a great case study on using Twitter to help grow your business.

The Coffee Groundz is an independent coffee shop/bar in the Houston area. Plenty of electrical outlets and free WiFi have helped draw in a techy crowd, but not as much as Twitter has.

Cohen signed up for a Twitter account for The Coffee Groundz in October and quickly reached 1,000 followers by following other prominent Tweeters in Houston.  In late October, he received a tweet from a customer who was in a hurry and asked if he could preorder a breakfast wrap so he could zip through the drivethru.  Cohen responded, “What do you want on it?”

It may have been the first time anyone used Twitter to place a to-go order.  The Coffee Groundz now has over 6,500 followers on Twitter. You can become one of them by following twitter.com/coffeegroundz.

Cohen uses Twitter to organize “tweet-ups” (social meetings organized via Twitter) at the coffee shop.  The tweet-ups have brought in over 200 people at once, many of them new to The Coffee Groundz.

“This is a big, big deal,” Cohen said in a recent interview.  ”A majority of these people have now become regulars. Twitter has allowed us to pull people from the Greater Houston area – and this is not easy for a standalone coffee shop.”

Watch the Twitter webinar above to learn more about the success of The Coffee Groundz and to hear from Cohen himself.