My day job involves showing people how to do social media the right way. The conversation is about optimizing engagement, gaining followers, and reaching consumers. Rarely do we talk about how to do it responsibly.

Last week, the official @JessicaJones Twitter account took a calculated gamble that was rewarded with thousands of retweets, favorites, and responses.

That gamble was whether or not to call out someone who had the nerve to express that he just didn't care for the show.

Ryan has roughly 165 followers. @JessicaJones has 167,000. Adding up the follower counts from the retweet accounts such as @MaraWrites, those 1,200 retweets mean the post has a potential maximum reach of over 1.5M impressions.

Imagine you're part of the social team responsible for this. You'd be ecstatic — Upwards of hundreds of thousands of impressions! Tons of engagement! A celebrity interaction!

Now imagine you're Ryan. Thousands of people laughing at you! A celebrity laughing at you! An unending stream of notifications of people laughing at you! All because you didn't like a show. You weren't rude or crass; you simply didn't like a show after giving it a fair shake.

This is how they treated a paying customer. Worse still, they're proud of this.

From bad coffee meaning you're a bad spouse to driving the wrong vehicle means your partner will leave you. Telling someone that they're inadequate is nothing new in advertising. This crosses a new line, though, by taking a real person and putting their "inadequacies" on display for the sake of a cheapshot. These aren't actors who signed up to be put down (by the way, the focus groups in the linked truck commercial are actors; they're not real focus groups).

This was just plain mean.

One of the oldest rules of comedy is that you don't punch down. Unfortunately, it's not that simple, as comedians like Daniel Tosh have built careers picking on schlubs. We participate in group mocking because A) it helps us feel like we belong and B) we're not the target. And that's exactly what happened. Following the quoted tweet, Ryan was dogpiled:

One user was nice enough to come to Ryan's defense. Unfortunately, this person had a typo in their tweet. By rule of schoolyard bullies, if you misspeak, your argument carries no weight.

This is how a bully handles confrontation. This is no different than repeating someone's words in an exaggerated, dumb voice. Jessica Jones is a very popular show, so the overwhelmingly positive response is not surprising.

Can you imagine if a cable company made fun of its customers like that?

Or a bank?*

Netflix accounts have a history of tone-deaf Twitter conversations that follow the same pattern. A Twitter user states their feelings on something, a Netflix account finds them and tries to make an example of them. The account manager then shows a brief flash of panic and leans on defusing oversteps with cutesy emojis, much the same way a bully throws out an empty compliment after the damage is done.

In this case, a Twitter user makes a joke, Netflix takes it all too seriously, and then gets called out for it. Instead of apologizing or admitting that they overstepped boundaries, they double down with a glib emoji. They just want to make a joke of it.

The @JessicaJones account tried this same pivot, blowing a taunting kiss.

That's not a response. It's a lie that tries to say "hey, we're all in this together having fun, right? This is all just fun!". Except of course, that the fun is at the expense of the Twitter user who didn't ask to be a part of the conversation.

Interaction is not permission.

An increasingly common mistake brands make is to assume that anyone wants to talk to them. This is of course not true, but we pretend that we haven't learned that lesson. We think, "oh, that desire to be left alone is for other brands. My audience is different. They love my product! Otherwise they wouldn't have mentioned using it." If I say a brand's name in a regular conversation, I'm not giving that brand permission to put me in a commercial or on a billboard.

*

This same standard must be applied on social media. We cannot assume we have anyone's permission to talk to them. No matter how organic it feels, anything coming from a branded account is an advertisement. Mentioning a product is simply not consent to be packaged as marketing. It is definitely not consent to be made the butt of a joke for an advertisement.

A few folks felt that this was Ryan's fault for tagging @JessicaJones in the tweet.

Obviously that's not fair to Ryan. Tagging accounts and using hashtags is normal Twitter behavior. It's as simple as that. Plus, as seen above and here, these accounts are interacting/shaming folks for just uttering the name. If you stand in front of a mirror with the lights off and say Jessica Jones three times, thousands of people appear and imply you're sexually inadequate.

Brands aren't real.

Jessica Jones is not real. She does not have feelings that can be hurt. Ryan is a real person. Ryan has feelings (so do Jamie and Zarrar).

I have to give him a lot of credit, Ryan handled this like an absolute champ.

I imagine this is in part because he didn't want to invite the further ire of Twitter just because he had the nerve to not like a show after giving it 7 hours of his life. After all, he describes the outcome as this:

The character of Jessica Jones is gruff and abrasive, so naturally the account is trying to match that tone. Again though, Jessica Jones isn't real. Those personality traits are employed however the person behind the account decides. In this case, they felt like being mean to some random person on Twitter, because that's what Jessica Jones would do. Jessica Jones is a jerk and she doesn't care. Knowing you're a jerk doesn't mean you have permission to be a jerk. It just means you don't care if you make people miserable. Making people miserable for the sake of a TV show is low. This isn't "telling it like it is." This is a deliberate marketing choice. This is hiding anonymously behind a popular brand and not caring about how your actions affect real people.

We have to do better.

Ultimately, it may not seem like a big deal. But look at the performance of just that tweet - 1,200 retweets, more than 2,000 favorites. This account was rewarded for being a brat. Many responses demanded the person running the account get a raise. Is the future of social media going to be behemoth hollow accounts deploying their massive follower bases after anyone who dares not enjoy their product? This could have a massively chilling effect on how people use an open platform like Twitter. As Twitter is experiencing first hand, it will simply result in an evaporating user base. Speaking as someone in advertising, we have to do better.

Part of using an open platform like Twitter is the risk of receiving negative attention from other users. But we can't control other users; those are real people. As advertisers, we aren't real people. We're brands. We don't have feelings that can be hurt. What if the next person targeted is a bit more sensitive than Ryan?

Just about any time a brand enters a space, we're intruding. We can't forget that. We're intruding into conversations, into people's personal-public space. That's not likely to stop any time soon. The least we could do is be polite about it. We can't turn into bullies when we're only now barely tolerated as uninvited guests.

N.B. I talked to Ryan; he approved this blog post.

*(fake examples using unpopular companies, please don't sue me)