Hawke & Co Troll A Customer On Twitter

US clothing brand Hawke &Co managed to upset a number of users on social media when their snarky customer response went viral.... as per the messages on their website social media respond "let's go"!

@Cconti was apparently not happy with his experience

Twitter: @billprady / Via Twitter: @billprady

Christian Conti was not satisfied with the outcome of his online shopping experience, when he had his order cancelled and Hawke & Co apparently refused to honour any discount available on their other products. @Hawkeandco responded from a now deleted tweet that @Cconti's 320 followers will understand.

It's seems size does matter.

Socially Visual / Via sociallyvisual.com

It's usually the case that brands usually respond faster and more pro-actively to accounts with larger follower bases. But they aren't usually mean or dumb enough to point this out as a fact to their followers...

Bill Prady noticed the tweet and jumped in

Twitter: @MattNowak1 / Via Twitter: @billprady

It seems that a number of influencers such as Bill Prady noticed the tweet from Christian and decided to use some of his social influence from his 2.07 million followers to amplify the issue by ReTweeting @Tammy's comment about when brands are jerks to their customers on public social networks.

Then it got weird when @Hawkeandco sent out this

Twitter: @davidiwanow / Via Twitter: @davidiwanow

But made this even more interesting is that Hawke & Co just deleted this tweet so the only record is the screenshot I took above. So did they just invent this how campaign as part of trolling social media or did someone tweet from an account they didn't mean to do...

So what? something is wrong...

Know Your Meme / Via knowyourmeme.com

So did someone screw up or send that from the wrong account? It seems a very strange tweet for a brand to send out... was that not meant to be seen and should have been a DM instead?

Update from Hawke & Co "Our Bad"

@hawkeandco / Via Twitter: @hawkeandco

It seems that 10 hours later after a good nights rest and social media has been slagging out the brand and after I deleted a few more tweets they sent out this message.

So what do you do?

FunnyJunk / Via funnyjunk.com

Can you ever love a brand again that screws up and shows they don't care about followers with small social audiences? I'd have to say their social team could learn a lot from UnMarketing on the topic of not being a jackass on social media.

This strategy of claiming it was just an experiment is a "new" one and even more interesting that first defensive tweet was deleted.