Hasta La Creative!

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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Man, wasn’t SXSW Interactive just the best this year? What’s that? You didn’t get to go due to cost or an obligation to do actual work? Well, lucky for you, Havas Media is happily providing what they call a “Twitter Novella” to tell you about all the fun you missed. Because, wow, it was just so much fun, you guys!

I don’t quite knows what qualifies this as a “novella” per se, but I suppose if you have a bunch of character-based Twitter handles using the same hashtag, then that might as well be the definition. Again, advertisers, you can make any unsubstantiated claim about anything you so long as no one makes the claim before you. Bonus points if it’s somehow involved with social media.

Throughout SXSW, Havas sent a team of its employees around Austin to tweet about the festivities as walking stereotypes would. The Hero Worshipper tweeted about celebs, stalking Grumpy Cat to wherever Mashable had a branded tent. The Data Geek quoted Nate Silver and dispensed somewhat useless statistics. The Bar Fly partied and drank. The Cynical tried to be cynical, but found it difficult due to all the fun. The Optimist loved everything. And finally, The Loner tweeted about loneliness.

Put these tweets together, and it’s though you were actually there instead of sitting at your office wondering how people have the time to ignore work for a week. Catch the Havas tweeters in the upcoming sequel “Twitter Novella: Cannes Edition.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.