Am I mean for just not caring what's currently trending on Twitter? Feels like a similar problem to showing ads on blogs. I'm there for the content and the ad has to be exceptionally good in order to get any of my attention.
But since then I have had the occasion to witness marketers using Twitter. And I have learned that, to a marketer, hashtags are pure heroin. You get to eavesdrop on strangers discussing products. You can count references to your product, and to your competitors' products. So what if this activity bears the same relationship to actually getting out of the building that playing Rock Band does to a real blues jam? It's a rush, and it comes in optimal tiny doses like Snackwell cookies, and it almost feels like productive work. From what I can tell a majority of the marketers in the world have Tweetdeck open all the time and wince reflexively every time anybody on Twitter says anything bad about their pet trademarks. To ask them to do otherwise is like asking a novelist to stop compulsively reloading their Amazon sales rank over and over.
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.