It does seem this year that the hashtag has landed this year. Hundreds of people are using twitter from conference. Hundreds of them are using the hashtag so that their thoughts can be shared with other similar users.

But it’s wider than that. People from other organisations are trying to use the hashtag to influence us, either from the voluntary orgs with stands at conference or from other parties trying to bait us into engaging with their views.

Here are some examples from the conference. RNID are using twitter to entice delegates to their stands – but once the delegates are there, RNID tweet the results of their conversations with the people who come to their stand.

Party IT provides Matt Raines and Tim Prater are tweeting from their stand – providing hot tips on quiet times to visit the exhibition and detailed restaurant reviews helping share intelligence between delegates.

Some tweeters are giving line by line commentary of the meetings and main stage events they were at – sometimes giving contradictory views of the same event. When Vince mentioned LVT (by principle, not by name), @jamesgraham exploded into paroxysms (“++ LAND VALUE TAX MENTIONED BY VINCE !!!1!11! OMG !! OMG !! ++”) but @adam_grant_bell responded rather more lukewarmly: “Rather scattered applause to Cable’s LVT suggestion. Good – no regressive tax, please #ldconf”. All in all, it reflects the diversity of opinion that people bring with them to conference.

The spectacle of people from other parties and none engaging with us through twitter is also an interesting phenomenon. To start with, there are the usual chunter merchants who inhabit pretty much every thread online to dismiss us out of hand with hilarious puns based on our name like “Lib Dim”. Since they dismiss us out of hand, we will do likewise to their usually inconsequential analysis.

Ever so slightly more substantially, is @kerryMP, Labour’s Twitter Tzar. Now I don’t know the MP in question, but I think it’s fair to say that on the basis of the twitter account, one barely gets the sense of a towering intellect. Kerry has started a “RT campaign” (which is, I suppose, the twitter equivalent of a postcard campaign”) to get the Lib Dem hierarchy to specify whether or not they would do a deal with a Tory minority government. And whilst Labour politicians are raising the scary spectre of Lib/Con coalition, Tory sources are pointing us at Tim Montgomerie’s piece suggesting we are on for a return of Lib/Labbery. (Kudos to Tim, while we’re on that topic, for updating his post in the light of our own research into the matter.)

Naturally, as a party of 10% of the MPs, 20% of the vote at the last election and 20% of the kingdom’s councillors, it’s not really our concern at this stage of the cycle to cosy up to one of the larger parties – but both of those other parties have a vested interest in portraying us as too closely aligned with the other to be of interest to their floating voters.

But as we heard at our fringe on Saturday night, it’s not the medium, it’s the message. So whilst the coalition chatter has begun on twitter, expect it to spill over into the rest of the world for the rest of the general election campaign.

Alex Foster has been encouraging politicians to use twitter for years, and has recently featured in his local newspaper. LDV will be running a fringe on Twitter on Wednesday.