Pie Company Has A Rogue Twitter Impostor, But Decides To Be Totally Cool With It

from the modern-mysteries dept

In the dual golden ages of internet and snark, individuals and companies are offered many opportunities to decide how to deal with people using social media to have fun at their expense. In most cases, this goes exactly how you'd imagine: strong-arm tactics to shut down social media accounts, lawsuits to silence fake or parody accounts, and even entire government agencies getting upset over one of its own tweeting against the agency line. Missing in all of this, as you may have noticed, is any sense of humor or fun about this sort of thing.

But level heads do occasionally prevail. Such appears to be the case with the folks at Table Talk Pies, a century-old pie-slinging company that decided in the past few years to have a better online presence, but also recently discovered someone out there is impersonating the company on Twitter.

Take a quick glance at Table Talk Pies' Twitter account and at first, everything seems normal. The 95-year-old Worcester company often tweets out its “pie of the day” deals – three of a daily rotating flavor for the special price of $1 – posts photos from events around the city and gets mentioned by other local businesses like Wormtown Brewery.

But a closer look reveals some strange inconsistencies.

“the honorable, pumpkin is 3 for $1 today”

“as the sun shines regardless, may luck be ever on the side with you!! #StPatricksDay2018 #pies #lucky”

“have not only a lemon but i smile! #threeforonedollar”

So, someone appears to be having some rather nonsensical fun pretending to be Table Talk Pies online. It's all rather bizarre, with the impostor account mostly tweeting out entirely accurate information about Table Talk's daily promotions, or just pimping the company's pies as hard as possible. But often the tweets do take a turn towards the strange.

It goes on like that. But what makes this somewhat unique is that the folks behind Table Talk Pies are both absolutely obsessed with finding out who this person is and with making sure everyone knows they're totally cool with the impostor account.

"It's very strange," Table Talk Pies retail store manager Caitlin Enck said. "We don't even want them to stop at this point, honestly, because everybody loves them."

After they discovered the strange messages, Enck contacted Twitter hoping to get information that could lead to the owner’s identity, but the company said it was unable to share the user’s IP address or email. Unless the account was posting derogatory tweets or slandering Table Talk, Enck was told nothing could be done.

“We could be super jerks about it and do the whole cease and desist thing, but why? They’re not doing anything wrong, they’re not hurting anybody,” she said. “All the things that would make us, as a company, be like, ‘This isn’t cool, we don’t want our name attached to it,’ they’re not doing. So their tweets are a little weird and don’t always make sense? They’re not hurting anybody.”

Which is the exact right filter through which to view all of this. Rather than trying to strong-arm whoever is behind the account, instead there's something of a following because it's an impostor account, leading to more coverage and information getting out about Table Talk's pies. And with this approach, the company comes off in a way that is earning it some public good will. Now, it's certainly occurred to us that this might be a big marketing ploy to have the company go viral. But if it is, it's extremely well done, and Enck comes off as genuinely obsessed with finding out who this is without being threatening about it.

“It has this cool mystique to it, it’s this really funny thing,” Nelson said. “We’ve known a little over a year now. It’s been crazy. I’ve gone through and tried to figure it out, we cannot figure it out to save our lives. I’ve become obsessed with it.”

"It's supposed to be a quirky, funny thing, and all of a sudden I'm detective Olivia Benson and this is a crime and I'm so far deep into it I can't get out," Enck added.

This is all to say that there are other options beyond being a jerk when these types of rogue accounts pop up. In this case, the account wasn't doing anything particularly negative as far as the "victim" company was concerned. But that's often the case elsewhere as well, where big corporate interests can't find their own sense of humor in dealing with it. In other words, there is potentially much to be gained by not going full protectionist, a lesson far too many companies need to learn.

Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: impersonator, pie, social media
Companies: table talk pies, twitter


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. icon
    mrtraver (profile), 23 Jan 2019 @ 7:47pm

    Bravo!

    This is the most positive thing I have read, seen, or heard all day.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    Stephen T. Stone (profile), 23 Jan 2019 @ 7:58pm

    They get points from me for the SVU reference.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    Gary (profile), 23 Jan 2019 @ 8:23pm

    Now I want to try their pie!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 23 Jan 2019 @ 9:44pm

    Re:

    Points, but also a little weird, given what Benson is generally investigating. Puts me in mind of the whole SNL "pumpkin patch" bit from that angle, only more criminal.

    Still, cool.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 23 Jan 2019 @ 9:50pm

    It's almost like there is a possibility people can't be hurt by known impostors. I'm shocked, I tell you! John Smith is not going to like this.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Jan 2019 @ 1:52am

    Great, except for the part where the imposter can get private information intended for the company (or individual).

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
    icon
    EmilyBrown (profile), 24 Jan 2019 @ 2:19am

    Love this very well design website where I found fantastic article Pie Company which has a rogue twitter impostor, but decides to be totally cool with it. What a positive and motivational writing here. I am really impressed.

    Emily,
    Professional nursing dissertation writer - http://www.dissertationhelp.uk/nursing-dissertation/ of Dissertation Help in UK.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. icon
    That Anonymous Coward (profile), 24 Jan 2019 @ 2:34am

    Someone loved your brand enough to make a twitter account...
    they promote your brand, aren't making up crazy Sweeny Todd pie specials, sometime they say some odd things (but other brand accounts talk to this account like it is a peer), but the overall is this is awesome.

    As long as they aren't hurting your brand, its not worth chasing.
    There is a special magic that this account has captured and you can not have paid some intern to keep the magic going.
    I can understand wanting to know who is behind it, but deciding its not worth messing with whats working.

    If only there was a way they could find a way to get some coupons and other company swag to the account runner without learning who it is. Keep some coupons for yourself for all of your hard work promoting us & please give away some of the swag to our followers.

    Embrace them, appreciate them, keep mostly hands off and watch. In all of this time, the person running the account hasn't called down the outrage hammer upon you... as long as that doesn't change I think this is a great symbiotic relationship.

    You keep making pies, because that is what you are very good at...
    Let the person behind the twitter account keep on going, because that is what they are really good at...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Jan 2019 @ 7:27am

    Re:

    A much better result than when you tell people to shut their pie holes!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Jan 2019 @ 8:06am

    The company I work for set up an entire Social Media dept to handle any mention of the name.

    A worker moderated a repair message board on the side. A flame war erupted when a competitor fanboy started bashing a product. As a result, we are forbidden to discuss our products without permission.

    They could take some lessons from Table Talk Pies.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  11. identicon
    Michael, 24 Jan 2019 @ 9:28am

    Re:

    How is that?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  12. icon
    Jeffrey Nonken (profile), 24 Jan 2019 @ 12:52pm

    The pie is a lie!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  13. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Jan 2019 @ 1:26pm

    Re: Re:

    Whenever someone DMs them information assuming they're DMing the actual company.

    However, to me it looks like a bot, possibly scraping their website. So DMing the account wouldn't likely give away too much.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  14. icon
    Adrian Cherry (profile), 24 Jan 2019 @ 2:54pm

    Shirley if you're applauding them for being goods eggs then the least you could do is provide a link to their website. ( I hope I got the right one :) )

    http://www.tabletalkpie.com/wp/

    Anyway what we really need to know is do they make butter pies and do they deliver to the UK?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  15. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Jan 2019 @ 1:52pm

    Re:

    Shirley didn't write this article, one of the Tim's did.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  16. identicon
    LauLu, 7 Feb 2019 @ 6:50am

    Table Talk

    Thank you for being the kind of company that has a sense of humor. Plus, people are talking more about your company because of the mystic. It's a win-win. Companies pay big money to keep this kind of attention going. Kudos!

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.