Without hashtags, you can still do most of this with regular ol' keyword searches. So I think search is your real enemy here, not hashtags.
An example of this that I used a bit in my thesis (admittedly not product based) was the #ausvotes hashtag for the Australian elections. There were plenty of Tweets that would have been very hard to identify as related to the election without that hashtag because they were mostly thoughts or opinions without context.