This column has been pinballing around my head for the past few months. I’m curious about hashtags. I’m under the impression that although everyone knows what a hashtag looks like, not many people pay attention to Twitter statistics beyond Follower counts. And now that every commercial – online or televised – comes with a hashtag, many of which seem perfunctory, I want to make an inexact science a bit more exact by evaluating basic Internet data and applying it to our coverage for the previous week.

Twitter clearly has value. Celebrities of varying degrees get paid silly amounts of money for sponsored tweets (sidebar: did you know that Melissa Joan Hart makes $9,100 for some of her tweets? That’s more obnoxious than silly). With money and brand equity to be had in the Twitter economy, every company can now slap a hashtag onto a visual ad and pretend to know what it’s doing. Remember when Newsweek ran with #MuslimRage? Or McDonald’s unintentionally eviscerating itself with #McDStories? Twitter can be tricky for the lazy and oblivious.

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We’ve certainly seen worse Twitter offenses over the years when it comes brands, like this one from two years ago. So, let’s just be like the kids these days and let out a loud SMH at what whoever handles Delta’s Twitter account just posted and already has several commenters and tipsters expressing everything from eyerolls to WTFs. Consider this a little mid-afternoon respite from all the agency-related madness of the week. The only good thing that can come out of this is that the self-proclaimed “Mack Daddy” is collecting a damn check somewhere.

Do you hate your car? Do you want to let the world know how frustrated you are driving around in a jalopy that is beyond repair? Honda can help – sort of. For the rest of today, Honda will be tweeting back Vine videos at unhappy drivers who post #WantNewCar on Twitter. The Twitter/Vine combo, developed by the automaker’s longtime agency RPA, is part of Honda’s Summer Clearance Sales Event, and is meant to provide some catharsis to drivers even though there aren’t any discounts or financial incentives for using the hashtag. There probably should be.

If you watch the promo clip above, you’ll see what it looks like when brands use social media for the sake of using social media rather than really committing to interacting with consumers on various social platforms.Take KFC and their annoying, yet memorable, #IAteTheBones campaign. It’s made to go viral and is primarily identifiable to KFC and no other brand. On Twitter, KFC offers followers free merchandise and deals related to the hashtag on a regular basis. Honda is only responding for one day. Even though Honda’s hashtag is much more relatable (one could argue it’s too generic) the execution feels unsure of itself, just like a teenage driver getting behind the wheel for the first time. Credits after the jump.

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If you’re worked up over Sharknado, you might also appreciate a smaller fish to fry: digital agency Art & Science have produced a Twitter-activated talking fish, à la Big Mouth Billy Bass the singing sensation. When people tweet to the @fishyourself account, the rubber fish on the wall of the Art & Science office turns its head and speaks whatever wise words were written, wirelessly.

The idea came about due to Art & Science’s “Awesome Idea of the Day” board, where employees are encouraged to post their serious or wackiest potential projects. Every once in awhile the agency hosts a hackathon, in which one or two of the ideas are produced.

It’s cute, and of course any expression of technological creativity is a helpful learning experience. But I wonder if the time spent engineering a talking fish could have been better used to educate an eager student on the ins-and-outs of an agency, or somehow using talent and resources to aid a charitable cause. Am I missing the point?

While we’ve seem almost every iteration of brands turning fans’ tweets into ads by this point, here’s a new spot for Wendy’s new Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger from agency VML that adds a musical component to this formula.

Using that hashtag #PretzelLoveSongs on Twitter AND Facebook (gah, Facebook has hashtags now), consumers who say exceedingly positive things about Wendy’s new burger had the opportunity for their praises to be turned into a musical number, with some having even been sung by former 98° frontman/Jessica Simpson spouse Nick Lachey during a live event last night in New York, where live-streams always take place for some reason. While the press release doesn’t say if the specific location was Times Square, we’re going to go ahead and guess this happened in Times Square.

Nothing like watching a former boy band member/reality star sing about a cheeseburger in probably Times Square. Oh, and VML offered the chance to participate via your social media, because the most effective use of it is to either praise or make fun of brands who spend a lot of money on advertising. If we’re lucky, it might even be a trending tweet. Update: The event actually took place at a Wendy’s location, natch, on 34th St in NYC.

Many top brands have preferred Instagram to Vine when deciding how to complement branding with viral videos, but that hasn’t stopped Snapple, with creative direction from NYC-based Code and Theory, from choosing six over 15. As part of Snapple’s Re-enFACTments digital campaign, here’s a little stop-motion animation to kick off the weekend. The above clip was designed by Khoa Phan, who Mashable declared “Vine’s Most Creative Stop-Motion Animator.”

Snapple and Code and Theory have reached out to a number of unique people on the platform to visualize the signature series of under-the-cap facts that lost their novelty appeal about ten years ago. Phan worked with fact #754 – an alligator can go through 3,000 teeth in a lifetime, a ridiculous number that probably excites dentists and orthodontists around the world. And, as you can see in a few additional Vines below, makes eating an apple more troubling than you’d expect.

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Catering to current trends of craft and crowdsourcing, Clear Channel Outdoor commissioned two “high-profile billboard muralists” to handpaint people’s tweets on a giant canvas during Cannes. And by smushing enough ideas together on a 16m x 4m screen, they’ve set a couple records: This was the world’s first hand-painted micrography billboard made entirely of tweets, and also the world’s first gigapixel image searchable by tweet.

To gather relevant words, CCO started Twitter debates with questions like, “Who owns the creative agenda?” and “Is technology redefining creativity?” People were into it: over the four-day period, the campaign delivered a total campaign reach of 15.7 million impressions on Twitter. “Who owns the creative agenda?” trended number two worldwide. As the responses streamed in, social media visualisations of the #canvas Twitter content were displayed on CCO’s website, digital screens at the festival, and a high-resolution projection to a separate 18m x 5m canvas located on the roof of the Le Grand Hotel.

It’s a sweet reflection of the spirit of Cannes, one that could have only been more accurate if it involved alcohol. See if your tweet was chosen here.

Usually, city rivalries related to sporting match-ups involve wacky wagers from politicians. The mayor of City X wants 100 pounds of cheese from the governor of City Y if City X wins the Super Bowl. But for the 2013 Stanley Cup between the Boston Bruins and the Chicago Blackhawks, the wacky wagers are getting social and, well, smack-talky. The folks over at Arnold Boston and Leo Burnett in Chicago are using the Stanley Cup to launch their own trash-talking competition for charity: The Smackley Cup. Agency employees and random fans from all over are encouraged to tweet using #smacktalkboston or #smacktalkchicago. Once the series concludes, the agency supporting the loser of the Stanley Cup will have to donate 10 cents per tweet and retweet to a charity AND wear the opposing team’s sweater in the office the following day. That sort of masochism always makes for fun water cooler talk.

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Last week, those perennial rabble-rousers at The Onion took it upon themselves last week to offer up a blow-by-blow account of a Twitter tiff (albeit fake) between President Obama and The Audubon Society (home to “the original tweeters” as the latter says). The slideshow thus prompted the president (or those handling his Twitter account nowadays) to suggest the Audubon Society as a Friday Follow on Twitter (Mashable has a summary of what transpired here).

Well, inspired by the goings on, GS&P decided to get its client, Audubon, in on the joke while thanking @BarackObama for the #FF by coming up with a musical effort dubbed “Tweet Your Tweet.” The project, which is a collaboration between the Goodby camp and Swedish music production company, Dinahmoe,  matches bird chirps to the corresponding tones/letters (a, b, c, d, e, f, g) in your tweets. As you can see in the image above, the president’s account is aptly enough the first to get a nod in “Tweet Your Tweet,” which can get somewhat grating after a while but hey, gotta appreciate the quick turnaround. Regarding the effort, GS&P chief digital officer Kalle Hellzen says, “…we immediately jumped on the opportunity to bring more #birders into the Audubon society. We developed the perfect ‘thank you’ to @barackobama and a fun experience for everyone else to play with.”

Credits after the jump.

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Russia’s abysmal track record for gay rights got unnecessarily worse last year, when a court ruling banned gay parades in the country for the next 100 years. Today, Stockholm Pride and M&C Saatchi Stockholm are fighting back with gowest2013.com, a digital campaign that lets Russians celebrate gay rights on Twitter for one well-intentioned thorn in the side of the Russian government: to get “Go West” trending in Russia. How are they going to accomplish this from a Swedish website, you ask? All tweets from the website automatically change location to a Russian city. Got to love technology.

If Stockholm Pride accomplishes their goal, I’d love to see the faces of Russian government officials after “Go West” starts trending. Stalin rolls in his grave, Putin rolls in his bed, Sting makes more music videos like this. If you’re interested in contributing, you can tweet from the website to help the cause and watch as Princeton, New Jersey turns into Ufa, Russia.