We all work in social media, so this may strike some as an odd question, but we’ll ask it anyway: don’t you just hate promoted tweets?

If you answered “No, I love them; they provide essential information on goods and services that I may or may not purchase,” then you must work in marketing. If you answered, “They are kind of annoying, aren’t they,” then you’re…everybody else.

Twitter has obviously become a key promotional platform in the past couple of years, but it wasn’t always this way—and some longtime users aren’t too happy about it. In fact, as The Wall Street Journal puts it, these young ruffians are all about “subvert[ing] the corporate vibe.” Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser called it “the eternal battle people have over hipsterdom.”

Really?

We never joined the “weird Twitter” club (sue us), which for the most part is all about making strange jokes rather than assaulting brands. But we do know that some comedy professionals use promo tweets as a platform for jokes, because duh:

Shut up nerd. RT @Staples: Back to school season is right around the corner!

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) August 4, 2013

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Chipotle‘s official Twitter feed, @ChipotleTweets, appeared to have been hacked when it started sending out strange, seemingly random messages this past Sunday, like:

Hi sweetie, can you please pick up some lime, salt, and onions? twitter

— Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets) July 21, 2013

Mittens13 password leave

— Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets) July 21, 2013

Later in the day, the company claimed there had been a “problem” with its Twitter account, and apologized to its followers for the confusion: Read more

Well, it’s moments like this that make us even more proud to have celebrated our independence from British rule yesterday, if for no other reason than we can claim at least a bit of separation from the royal baby mania that led to this creep-tastic campaign.

With only weeks left until the regal infant is due to make his or her debut, speculation over everything from the baby’s gender to its future choice of university has reached a fever pitch. Cashing in on all the conjecture is British gambling website Paddy Power, which is taking bets on just about everything related to the future royal.

In an attempt to urge locals to cast their bets as to the child’s hair color, Paddy Power sent four people dressed as rather hideous giant babies into the streets of London. The gargantuan infants were spotted by unfortunate commuters on the London tube, and later outside Buckingham Palace (more photos below).

The gambling website is no stranger to weird, tasteless marketing stunts; Paddy Power was responsible for the most complained-about ad in the UK in 2010, which involved a blindfolded soccer player kicking a cat.

Oh, and in case you were curious, the current hair color odds are: ginger 7/1, brunette 6/4, black 2/1 and blonde 7/2.

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If you were in New York City last weekend, you had an advanced July 4th celebration with a slew of Benjamin Franklins, thanks to Virgin Mobile. The mobile company let loose 100 Benjamins to drum up attention for its special deal — they’re offering $100 to anyone who switches carriers through July 7. Personally, we kind of forgot that this was a Virgin Mobile clip about 20 seconds in, but that could be because we’re drunk on Independence Day joy.

via @becktold

Virgin Mobile has been upping its game over the past few weeks, adding the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy Ring to its offerings. However, the latter doesn’t have 4G, so meh on that.

Separately, but truly in the spirit of the day, the Statue of Liberty reopened today, months after it shut due to damage from Superstorm Sandy. There was a ribbon-cutting ceremony this morning, and we’ve seen a lot of pics and hoopla popping up on Twitter. Nearby Ellis Island remains closed.

We pulled the snapshot at right from Tom Becktold, Business Wire’s SVP of marketing. Very cool.

The New Yorker decided to celebrate gay marriage’s (limited) Supreme Court victory with a cover illustrating its signature brand of humor—the kind that inspires quiet chuckles from its readers and confuses or frustrates everyone else.

Everyone’s joked about Bert and Ernie’s “domestic partnership” for some time (along with the fact that Bert is the biggest bad guy since the Wicked Witch), but as a preview of this week’s cover made its way around the blogosphere, quite a few media observers asked “why?”—and a surprising number of people beyond the usual crowd took offense.

Here go the arguments:

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“It was a moment of elation. I’d been waiting for six and a half years. I’d worked hard, waited so long and rehearsed it in my head, so I was impatient.” That’s how tightrope performer Philippe Petit described his experience when he first ventured out onto the wire that extended between the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center (WTC) in August 1974. He traversed the span between the towers for 45 minutes, making spellbinding history that’s never been repeated.

Petit was speaking outside at the Bryant Park Reading Series in New York on Wednesday about his latest book, Why Knot?: How to Make More Than Sixty Ingenious, Useful, Beautiful, Lifesaving and Secure Knots. True to form, he turned the session into a lively performance, complete with magic tricks. He imparted his knotting knowledge to audience members and enlisted their help with demonstrations.

Petit has personified his brand since the age of five when he taught himself the art of tightrope walking. He said it was “a way to escape authority”. Starting in the 1970s, the Frenchman set his sights on world renowned landmarks, including the towers of Notre Dame in Paris, and the pylons of Australia’s Sydney Harbor Bridge.

Petit’s gravity-defying promenade across the World Trade Center towers was his biggest “coup”. In order to gain access to the site, he pretended to be a journalist at an architectural magazine. After his widely publicized risky stunt and subsequent arrest, (charges were later dropped), he gained worldwide fame. He was even feted at WTC’s Windows on the World restaurant, (on the same evening as this PRNewser contributor was celebrating a birthday!)

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There’s nothing like a brisk walk outdoors: the sun shining on your face, the birds chirping in the trees, and the dog poo squishing under your shoe.

As avid walkers, we find ourselves griping about inconsiderate dog-walkers on a regular basis. If you’re taking your dog for a stroll, bring a bag. It’s not that hard. No one is buying the oh-so-apologetic “I had no idea he would do something like this, so I find myself utterly unprepared” shrug you try to give passersby as your dog proceeds to squat down in the middle of the walkway.

But since signage doesn’t seem to shame offending parties into cleaning up after their pets, it appeared little could be done to cut down on the number of canine-created landmines pedestrians must dodge on a daily basis.

Enter McCann Madrid.

The town of Brunete, on the outskirts of Madrid, teamed up with the agency to tackle the problem on a limited budget. The agency’s solution was to employ 20 volunteers to patrol the streets, watching for dog owners who skirted their poop-and-scoop responsibilities.

When an offending party was spotted, a volunteer would approach the unsuspecting dog owner, and engage them in a friendly conversation about their pooch. Then, using only the name and breed of the dog in question, they looked up the owner’s address via the Town Hall pet census databases, packaged up the abandoned dog poop as “Lost Property,” and returned it to the guilty party via courier.

Gross? Totally. Creepy in a stalker-ish sort of way? Definitely. But it’s pretty hard to argue with the results: According to the agency, there has been a 70% drop in the amount of poop on Brunete’s streets. 70 percent!

We told you last week about Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries only wanting his brand’s clothing worn by “cool kids” — i.e. no one that falls outside the stereotypical “All American” standards of beauty, including girls over a size 10. “A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong,” Jeffries once said in an interview. “Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

To make matters worse, it seems that less-than-cool kids aren’t the only people who don’t “belong” in A&F clothing — when garments are damaged and/or cannot be sold, rather than donating the clothes to people who need them, the company reportedly burns them. Why? Because homeless people aren’t the sort of brand representation A&F wants. So basically, Abercrombie has sent this branding message into the universe: “Six-pack abs and chiseled jaw required. Soul optional”.

In response, Greg Karber decided to give Abercrombie a brand makeover. After sifting through the “douchebag section” of his local Goodwill thrift shop for donated A&F clothing, Karber headed to LA’s Skid Row to hand out the clothes to the homeless, who, after displaying initial reluctance to accept the clothing (which Karber attributes to a fear of looking like “narcissistic date rapists”), eventually accepted the A&F clothes, completing phase one of Karber’s mission.

However, in the video below, Karber says that he can’t “clothe the homeless or transform a brand” all by his lonesome, and urges viewers to get involved. A grassroots re-branding campaign to teach a company to grow a soul? Like we said before: we sense a Glee episode coming on…

Clearly, the promoters of the soon-to-be-revived cult classic “Arrested Development” did not “make a huge mistake” when they organized yesterday’s NYC giveaway of “Bluth’s Bananas”, a frozen treat featured on the show.

Diehard fans waited as long as 30 minutes in lines that stretched nearly two blocks for a chance to get their own chocolate-dipped frozen bananas from the authentic-looking replica of the Bluth family’s stand.

“I am such a major fan,” 21-year-old Sharah Stanley told the New York Daily News as she waited in line. “When I found out it was going to be here, I raced up. I hope the line doesn’t take too long because I’m on my lunch break.”

Stanley is not alone in waiting on bated breath for new episodes of her beloved show. Arrested Development, which originally ran from 2003 to 2006, will be reborn with a new season scheduled to be released by Netflix on May 26.

While many companies may reward employees’ loyalty, New York City real estate company Rapid Realty is asking for a lifelong commitment in exchange for a bump in pay; any employee willing to tattoo the company’s logo on their body will automatically receive a fifteen percent raise.

Selling your own skin as billboard space? Crazy, right? That’s what we thought, but apparently at least forty Rapid Realty employees have already deemed the bribe worth the body art.

Stephanie Barry justified her decision with hard-to-deny simplicity, telling CBS: “I was like, why am I throwing my money away when I could give myself from $25,000 to $40,000 for the same amount of work?” And she’s not alone. Since there are no size or location restrictions, workers have gotten creative, one person getting inked stealthily behind her ear.

Not everyone is buying in, though. When CBS asked non-Rapid Realty-employees if they would do the same thing at their jobs, responses ranged from “[the reward] would have to be extraordinary” and “It’s a scar for life. I have enough of those.”

What about you, readers? Would you be a walking billboard for a hefty pay raise? Tell us in the comments section.