Whoever is running @OfficialTaser deserves a raise.

Like most Americans, a large portion of my tweets are inspired by dumb things I say that I am certain are funny, but my friends and family fail to properly acknowledge these nuggets of comedy gold as anything less than brilliant. So, I send my hilarity into the Interwebs in hopes that the online hordes will confirm my genius. Also, like most Americans, there is often alcohol involved, as it was with my loving jab at Taser International, maker of non-lethal self-defense products. I suggested that their new ad campaign should be Taser: The Gentleman’s Lead Pipe. I will leave it to the aforementioned hordes to rule on my under vs. over-appreciated brilliance, but this morning I realized I was bested by the response from Taser’s official Twitter account:



I was being a troll. They saw that I was being a troll, but responded with a humorous and benign reference to President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Big Stick” ideology. If I’d been looking to get into a flame-war, which I wasn’t, they’d have peacefully disarmed me. Anyone following would have just giggled at how dumb I looked flopping on the ground while urinating myself.

For all you big corporations, this is how you win at Twitter.

In contrast, a big retailer who shall remain nameless, got pulled into a Twitter brawl with the organizers of the Deluxe Winter Market, inciting massive blowback after incorrectly guessing that Deluxe did not have deep Oklahoma roots. Rather than seeing Deluxe as champions of locally crafted art, this retailer imagined Deluxe as snotty out-of-towners ranting about the company’s ties to a controversial Oklahoma politician whose name rhymes with failin’. The result was gruesome as Deluxe followers rallied to pile onto the retailer, that now just looked like a tone-deaf bully. The social media massacre was punctuated with an official apology via Twitter and phone from a company executive. This is how you lose at Twitter.

And, just to be clear, I have no problem with Taser. In an unofficial poll, nine out of ten respondents would prefer to see cases of questionable tazings resulting in hilarious gifs versus questionable shootings resulting in tragic funerals and heart-breaking community meltdowns. In a secondary poll, nine out of nine respondents agreed that the tenth guy was a bit of a nutjob and really wished he’d stop talking about 9-11 conspiracies so much.