This exchange came through on Twitter today, and I had to share for two reasons.
#1 – It’s funny.
and
#2 – It illustrates that social monitoring tools don’t differentiate between legitimate praise and extremely thick sarcasm.
I’m guessing what likely happened is that the person behind the wheel of the Surface Twitter account had some kind of notification system set to inform them when the product is mentioned so that they may reply. Sadly, this particular tool can’t detect sarcasm, which Eric’s post was laced heavily with, and neither did the person replying on the Surface account.
If you’re going to have someone engage on behalf of your business, it’s important to train them so that they actually read the Tweets they are responding to, and furthermore to recognize the presence of sarcasm.
Otherwise you can appear careless, and dare I say it, stupid. Ooops.
Special thanks to Eric Stoller for being Eric Stoller.