169: Is it Safe for your Brand to Have a Snarky Twitter Account? with Dusty Weis

Last week, the brand Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer got into a brew.

Ha ha.

For a rather blue tweet posted by one of their employees. Keep listening for that tweet. Listener discretion is advised. Welcome to the Indestructible PR Podcast, where we use current events and tested media and PR strategies to help you manage a crisis and build an indestructible reputation. You Twitter can be a great way to connect with customers and show off your brand's personality. But is it safe to be snarky and sarcastic? There's a thin line between being clever and sounding mean, and you don't want your brand to cross it. My guest, Dusty Weiss from podcamp Media, a branded podcast production company, joins me this week to discuss tips for having a snarky, edgy Twitter account without damaging your brand. Take a listen. Dusty, I'm so happy yet not to speak with you on the podcast today. Welcome. How's that for an intro?

I'm here for it. Thank you, Molly. Thank you for the invitation. It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you, Dusty.

The topic we're going to talk about today is one. I'm so excited to talk about it. Not only the topic, but also to talk about it with you. But before we get there, I have to take this dog leg before we even get into it, to introduce who you are on this podcast. I was a guest on your amazing podcast about PR and marketing lead Balloon, and you had interviewed me about my experience with FEMA and that aired. It was number. Episode. Like 25, 26.

Right around in there. Yeah, episode 25. Yep. One of the best, one of the most compelling episodes that we've done so far. And that was solely based in just the intensity and the heartfeltness of the story that you and your former colleague Mike told.

Yeah, and you and I talked offline before we started this recording, but I was telling you one the production value and just the journalistic style and effort that you put into it was beyond compare. I mean, it was absolutely amazing, but it was a little triggering for me. It was very triggering.

It was a triggering story. Molly, not everybody has had their first run over by a truck in the middle of a disaster zone, but these are the experiences that we have as storytellers. Sometimes to tell the best story, we have to put ourselves in harm's way. And your story of doing that and Mike's story of doing that to help other people and to tell a compelling story is really one I think that a lot of people in this field can relate to and so thank you for sharing it. And that's what we do on the Lead Balloon Podcast is we really try to get to know the people behind the public relations and marketing titans of this industry. Because at the end of the day, we all go home, we all hug our kids, we all pet our dogs, and we all have stories from our past that love them or hate them, we tell ourselves, and they really define us as people and not as professionals as well. And so you're taking the time to share that is something that certainly will stick with me. And I've heard from a number of professionals in this space since then that your bravery in sharing that story has inspired them as well. And so thank you for doing it. It's not all that on lead balloons sometimes. And a lot of the time it's a little more light. It's funnier stories like, oh no, the box of press releases got dropped on the airport tarmac in the rain and the press conference was ruined or things like that. But the further I get into this lead balloon project, the more that I realize that there are a lot of people that have found themselves in tough positions in the field of public relations and marketing and we can share those stories and bond over the, I guess, the shared trauma of having to work in a field of strategic communications.

Yeah, a lot of the topics that you talk about, they are light. Mine was more like lead. It was probably heavier of a topic, but it's an excellent podcast, so it's nice to reciprocate and have you on my podcast. And we're going to, as you mentioned, keep it a little light because we're going to keep it light because your topic. And we went, you know, back and forth with topics. There was one that jumped out which screams Molly McPherson. And the topic of just edgy brand Twitter. You and I were talking or emailing each other when there happened to be a tweet from a beer company that went a little viral. And you, Dusty, being from Wisconsin, you know your beers, don't you?

It's near and dear to my heart. And I'll tell you this too, Molly, when PBR stepped in it, so to speak, earlier this year with their attempt to do some edgy brand Twitter A, I was delighted because everybody enjoys talking about a successful campaign, but maybe I'm evidence of this. I enjoy talking about spectacular failures and disasters a little bit more. And so the first thing that I did, Molly, was start working my sources, being Milwaukee based and trying to find out sort of the story behind the story of this epic fail on PBR's Twitter account, Pabst Blue Ribbon. Of course, we all know they got a Blue ribbon back in 1896, and they've been bragging about it ever since. And so, yeah, I worked my sources a little bit and might even try to do a lead balloon about it down the line here. But as usual with these things, there's a little more to the story behind the scenes. Dusty maybe didn't make it into the coverage yet.

Are you bringing an exclusive to the Indestructible?

We got the scoop cast, Molly.

I love it. I love it. Okay, well, why don't you bring us back to this? I saw the tweet. The day of the tweet, it was cringy, but it was also spit out your drink type of a reaction. Like, what is going on now? You're like me. You see something happen online. I'm sure you're like me. You want to know what's behind it. Who's behind it? Is it a hoax? Is it a person? Is it a drunk Gen Z? Like, who did this? So, Dusty, give us the history of what happened. And you have to say it word for word. We're not going to make it.

Oh, you're going to make me say it, all right. You're going to make me blind.

I'll say it if you want, but it has to come. You know what?

I got it right here. I got it right here. So. All right, let's hear level setting in the. In the beer drinking community, there's a certain subset and they like to, I guess, observe an event that they call Dry January. Right? And I guess the idea is you can have a beer every night during the year, but as long as you don't drink during one month out of the calendar year, that demonstrates that you've got it under control. Right? So that's that. And here's the thing, like, it's important to keep drinking in control. I say this coming from Wisconsin, where we are very, very enthusiastic about beer and celebration of life and all of that kind of thing.

Well, and, you know, saying this from someone from Minnesota, you know, that is what you are all about. Just drinking yourself into oblivion, you know?

Well, and we're better at it than you guys over in Minnesota, too, I'll tell you that. Sorry. The competitive part of me is already coming out here. And so as all of these Twitter accounts were observing Dry January, whoever was running Pabst Blue Ribbon's Twitter account, and they have had a history over the past few years, Here of trying to just tiptoe right up to the edge and embrace their status as kind of a. Kind of a third tier beer. They're not a beer that gets served in fine goblets unless it's being done ironically. You know what I mean? They're a parking beer is how we would refer to it around here in Wisconsin. You drink a PBR at the tailgate at Miller park or Lambeau Field, and maybe you drink, you know, four or five of them and crush the can over your head when you're done. But this is not. This is not a fine drinking experience here. And so their Twitter account has really embraced this. And to a certain extent, they've done a good job of defining who their target audience is and talking to them in a language that vibes with that crowd. But then they tiptoed up over the line here early in January 1st when they tweeted out a really incredible Photoshop job that advertised, here at pbr, we're not celebrating dry January, we're celebrating wet January. And it had a big wave and dolphins and water skis, and it was very testosterone infused thing that I think a lot of people looked at it and said, oh, that's pretty funny. And then a lot of people went at this and said, well, wait a minute, are you mocking sobriety here? Are you, Are you mocking this effort by people to exert control over alcoholism? Like, what are you driving at? And so that marinated for a little while and I think really this played out all over the course of 24 hours and then out of the blue, and like a bolt of lightning, whoever was running the Twitter account tweeted, not drinking this January. Try eating ass. And that was really the. A bomb that shocked the world of Twitter because it got so far outside of the brand Twitter sphere and the beer Twitter sphere. I'm a big beer fan and so I follow a lot of prominent beer critics, all of whom unanimously retweeted this and said, what are they thinking at Pabst Blue Ribbon?

Okay, but are you going to tell me though? You know, what happened? Like, I've read up on what they think happened. You know, I saw the response, but do you know deeper than the response? You know, the inside scoop? A little bit.

A little bit. A little bit. The response, of course, officially. And by the way, if you haven't clicked into this thread, hopefully it's archived somewhere because they deleted the tweet.

They deleted it, yes.

Which begs the question of. And. And we'll get into this more down the line. Here, if you're going to engage in edgy brand Twitter, for the love of Pete, if it's good enough to press send on the tweet, there's no reason to delete it after the fact, like live by edgy brand Twitter, die by edgy brand Twitter. But if, if this is a decision that you have made as a company that you are going to engage in this type of marketing, stand behind it, have the guts to stand behind it. And so what we saw at PBR was sort of your standard CYA we're having a disaster on Twitter approach. They blamed a rogue employee and deleted the tweets and did a couple of well placed interviews about it and then quickly tried to change the subject as quick as possible. And like so many things in the Twitter sphere, it'll be last week's news in fairly short order here. But to blame a an a rogue employee is mildly ridiculous when this is exactly the type of content that has been coming out of this Twitter account for literal years. And this was clearly a strategy that they had arrived at. And blessed. It's not like they were unaware that PBR had a Twitter account and it was putting out this kind of material. And so to say it was a rogue employee is a little bit, and this has been confirmed by my sources that there was a person on the team who had been deputized to speak as the brand and for the most part people kind of rolled their eyes and chuckled about it. And then this happened and that person took the fall, fell on the sword and really hadn't done anything all that different from what had been going on for years there. But they had to be the sacrificial lamb to cleanse the sins of all of pbr.

Well and that's what brings us to the topic of this podcast, this edgy brand Twitter. There's so many brands out there, food related brand have really embraced this edgy Twitter Persona, if you will. We know a lot of fast food, you know, Wendy's, Arby's, Burger King, they've done a masterful job being witty, you know, online and so many of them try to compete with each other, I think in the hierarchy of wit, I think Wendy's has always been considered. They had their moment where they had the wittiest Gen Z person or young millennial, you know, behind, behind the controls at Twitter. Burger King, of course, last year, last January I believe is when they around International Women's Month. I thought it was that they got into trouble when they said a woman should be the Woman should be in the kitchen, right? One of those intentional tweets that went sideways quickly. What was interesting about this in your. Everything you've said, spot on, 100%, the PBR brand is to be edgy. You're a beer. That's what you need to do. What I found interesting is it really did sit on the line of, is this a rogue employee? Which in their official statement, they called this employee an associate, and the associate, you know, did that. So it was definitely an inside job. It wasn't a hack. You know, thank God they didn't say that they were hacked. It was a hack because that would.

Have come out, right? Because it always comes out.

Exactly. Cause you don't get hacked on Twitter. However, it not only was, like, edgy, but try eating ass. Like, what is that? I mean, there's a lot of edge out there, but that's where it. Oh. I looked at it as. This is an employee who quit as soon as they hit send. Because that is like, blow up the Twitter account type of tweet, wouldn't you say? I mean, there's a lot of edgy things, but eating ass.

And it went on because it was not just a one and done.

One and done.

They engaged with people for the better part of a day before someone in management pulled the plug on it. One of my favorites from further down the thread, if you got to read the thread before it was deleted, was somebody tweeted back to pbr, PBR or ass, what's the difference? And whoever was running the account shot back, ask your mom. I know. Whoa.

I mean, it's crazy, but you're right. It's that second tweet. So that's when I kept reading it. And it's so funny. Like, ask your mom the term your mom. I think you have younger kids, but, like, Gen Z, that's a phrase. Like, your mom, like, that's a throwback. So I thought, okay, this is a young kid behind the controls of Twitter. They're going all in. And so my analogy for this is you're a parent. You have teenagers. Parents know that teenagers drink, but they don't want to confront it. They just let it happen. Until the police show up at your door because you have a party or they're arrested, right? And. And. And then the parent or the exec.

Right, dad, you did a beer bong with us.

But then, like, the executives are the parents here. They got called out. They went too far paying attention. They said, oh, our young social team is being our young social team until it was a problem. So, Dusty, now we're talking about what are the rules? What's the playbook for edgy Twitter, using PBR as an example?

Well, I think it starts with making sure that you have deputized the right person if you are going to engage in brand Twitter. There's a whole AMA that the social team behind the Wendy's Twitter account did once. And it's actually a really fascinating AMA if you want to dive into Reddit and read it. Because they lay out their process. And Wendy's actually, they use a committee of people to come up with these things, but it's not a committee style process. It's very. Because you have to be quick, you have to move, you can't send it through a lot of approvals or it'll never get done. And so Wendy's has this social media team that they've built a process where the only time that they need to get approval from up the chain is when they are attacking their competitor McDonald's in a tweet. That's the only time. Other than that, they have a well defined set of guardrails that they are expected to stay within, but they can just basically do whatever they want and sass whomever they want to sass.

And reading that too. You know that Wendy's profile, it has this SNL writers room feel. They are a TV show. They all collaborate, they're working together. It's like a comedy team. Like they're script writers, they're writers working on a project. In this case, it happens to be Twitter. So for the big brands, they can do it and they can do it well and they have the talent there. But Dusty, would the average brand, should they be getting into edgy Twitter?

The average brand can't afford to hire five or six comedians to sit around and write Twitter jokes all day. And so if you are the average brand and you're looking to be edgy on Twitter, the first thing that you have to do is make sure that it feels authentic. Because for every, every one of these brands that steps over the line, you have 10 brands who just get mocked mercilessly for hello, fellow kids. Ing it. You know, the Steve Buscemi meme where he's trying to act like he's a kid. If you come across as insincere or inauthentic in brand Twitter, you are just as likely, if not more likely, to get panned and beat up by everybody else.

Eviscerated. So the currency, you're absolutely right. So the question is like what, which is more risky? And you look at PBR or ass or is it being. Or is it, you know, is it being, you know, putting up, you know, clunkers on Twitter? And I think if you just have an inauthentic brand or one that is witless can cause more damage.

Right. I would tend to agree with you there. And it's why I think the question that you have to ask as a brand is whether you want to engage in edgy brand Twitter at all. If you're going to do it, go all in and do it. Right. But edgy brand Twitter is like Thunderdome. There are no rules. It's messy and usually unpleasant. And there's a pretty good. There's as good a chance that you'll get murdered as there is that you'll succeed. And so ask yourself, really, if you want to get. Because in a way, my background, my early background is in radio. Right. And in a way, this is the morning Zoo, the shock jock approach to doing branded social media. And you can leverage this incredible engagement if you do it right. But if you're aiming for the edge, sometimes you overshoot. And when that happens, you can have a tough go of it. And so I like that.

Bringing in the Morning Zoo, the edgier ones on Morning Zoo, or the Howard Stern esque type of communications and broadcasting. Yeah, look at your Twitter with the same approach.

It's the same approach.

It's a radio show.

It's relatable. People, at least to a certain point, have always enjoyed feeling like they're in on the joke. And so if you define your in group, it's okay to piss people off on edgy brand Twitter. I would argue that that's sort of the point is you have an in group and you have an out group, and obviously your in group is bigger than the out group, and you spend some time deliberately triggering people. And it's been a successful strategy for a lot of people. I mean, I'll throw it back to. I have a whole list of examples of brands that have done it really good, but one of my favorites. And I've been in this space for a long time. I'm a digital n. A millennial. And one of my favorite edgy Twitter accounts is the account run by my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Go Badgers.

Oh, geez. I knew you were going to bring in the badgers. Wait, you're saying that you. What happened with. With them? They have an edgy account. I didn't know anything was edgy in Wisconsin.

Well, you See, a long time ago, back in, in 2012, I think it was, the UWMadison Twitter account was taken over by a young fella, 22 years old, mid grade millennial named Nate Mole. And he was really sort of deputized from an early age. And they said, well, you know all about this Twitter thing, right? Just go ahead and just do your thing. And so he was able to. He identified very early on that the most important audience that he had to address was students at the UW and prospective students especially. And he was very canny in doing a good job of making the university look good, but also talking smack. And I brought this up specifically because of your roots in Minnesota, because his most frequent target was Goldie the Gopher. And he was just absolutely merciless in eviscerating the Golden Gophers, particularly over their shameful and embarrassing inability to ever win Paul Bunyan's axe and their running rivalry with the Wisconsin Badgers.

Oh, wait a minute. This is coming back to me. This is coming back. But didn't they just win the pulp Onion?

Look, they went like, they went like 20 years without touching the darn thing. So I think the record speaks for itself.

Well, the record does. And Nate. Okay, now it's coming back. I didn't know it was Nate, but now I do remember seen social media action as it related to the Gophers and the Badgers there certainly.

And it's always. It's never been just overt things, but it's always been just really subtle jabs and deliberately mean stuff. Like, you know, the Sunday morning after a particularly bad Gophers loss, just tweeting, hey, Goldie, y' all good? How are things? And so, so he's just. He's a master and he's still running the thing. But then you look at a brand like Denny's. Denny's is known for its very weird, sad, depressed tweets. And Wendy's, again, the food space is, you know, Denny's tweeted, once upon a time, if you close your eyes while holding a warm pancake, it's almost like holding hands with a real human and just really targeting that sort of absurd millennial humor and getting real weird. We talked about Wendy's for a second and the way that they're not just unafraid to go toe to toe and roast McDonald's, but how they'll roast their listeners or viewers, as it were, too, to the point where people actually tweet at Wendy's to get Wendy's to roast them.

Roast Me? Yes. And that's clever. That's straight Reddit Twitter right there. And such a good job. So Dusty, what can someone take away from this? Someone running a PR comm shop, an owner, a manager, executive team. What do we take away from this for a brand, like in terms of their social media account?

Well, again, ask yourself whether you really want to wade into that space. And if you do wade into the space, know that you do it with a certain amount of risk. It is not a safe play. Now, with risk comes the potential for reward. So do that internal calculus. Decide whether or not you're ready to do this, and then whatever you do, make sure that it is authentic. Authenticity comes from being self aware, from having a good sense of humor, a good sense of the absurd, and being willing to poke fun at yourself. Also understanding a good old fashioned ironic sense of humor. And again, that level of authenticity, unless you've got an entire writer's room and a really solid process and a blessing from upper management, it doesn't come from committee think. And so for mid level organizations, it really comes down to deputizing one person to speak for the brand, making sure that it's the right person, and then giving them solid guardrails to do it. I, once upon a time I ran the Twitter account for the City of Milwaukee. And City of Milwaukee cannot afford to have an entire writer's room full of people. And so it was just me. I had permission from management to do it. I had permission to be a little bit edgy, but the guardrails that I were given were this. And that's. You have 16 bosses when you work at the City of Milwaukee. You have 15 members of the city council and you have one mayor. And if what you are tweeting would not get the unanimous approval from what, all 16 of those people, then absolutely do not do it. Now that still leaves you a little bit of wiggle room to have fun. I got into a very public and highly retweeted spat with the city of New York once upon a time.

About what?

Snow. What else? It's Wisconsin. It was 2015 and they were tweeting at the time about Snowmageddon2015 and this is when they got all of 8 inches of snow. And so as the City of Milwaukee, we just started piling on, so to speak, mocking the fact that 8 inches of snow was enough to shut down the entire city, mocking the fact that Al Roker had been so worked up on Good Morning America about it, and that blew up. That was my most highly Engaged tweet by an order of magnitude when I tweeted on behalf of the city of Milwaukee, and it was all in good fun at the end of the day. We even ended with an exchange where the city of New York and the city of Milwaukee made up with each other very publicly on Twitter, and we promised to send them a basket of beer and cheese and sausages in the most Wisconsin way possible.

And did you do it?

Oh, of course. You got to follow through with the beer and cheese and sausage.

And did your bosses. Did your 16 bosses, okay, did you know you could go attack New York?

I knew that nobody would have a problem with us coming out swinging at New York, because at the end of the day, punching up is always a popular thing on social media. If New York came out swinging at the city of Milwaukee, oh, they would have caught it on the chin. But once we threw the first punch, it was anybody's game, and we had a lot of fun with it.

And you want to make sure, though, you don'. You don't go too far because you don't want to be Twitter sleeping with the fishes because you annoyed someone in New York just a little bit too much, and that would have been the end. So, Dusty, I have to ask, when you're in Milwaukee, did any of your tweets say Shamil Shamazal?

You know, I actually had a lot of fun running the city of Milwaukee Twitter account because I also had access to the historic archives. And so to that end, I did a lot of tweeting of old photos of Milwaukee's iconic City hall clock tower with, yes, the welcome to Milwaukee signage on it from Laverne and Shirley. And I'll add that if you ever come to Milwaukee, Molly, you and I can take the Lakefront Brewery tour together, which is staffed by very edgy local comedians. It is always a laugh. And it ends at that very same bottling line from Laverne and Shirley. They actually bought their bottling line from the old Schlitz Brewery. And so you can stand there with bottles running down and put a glove on it and sing the song as the bottles run down the line.

Oh, that sounds cool. That sounds great.

I've been to Milwaukee. Let's go, Molly.

Oh, yeah. You know, Dusty, I've been to Milwaukee. You know, I went to a Braves game. They lost to the Mets, you know. Oh, that's great. Well, congratulations on that. That is. That is a career high in the whole social media world. And you must also have been terrified, too, at the same time, because when you Hit send. You never know what's gonna happen.

It is a lot of responsibility to tweet on behalf of an entire population of six hundred and some thousand people. But I always enjoyed that very much. And I always enjoy talking smack about you folks in the bigger cities, too. So, you know, why?

Well, I do think funny.

Milwaukee's a scrappy town.

It's scrappy. I think it's funny that you said that. You said all the comedians in Milwaukee. Is it plural?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. See, even got me doing it there right now. We got a raging comedy scene, and most of it comes with that sort of good natured. Oh, I'm just a Midwesterner, and I have really, you know, I've got thoughts and opinions about things, but really, at the end of the day, they're not that important. Cause, you know, that's us in the Midwest in a nutshell.

Your last funny comedian out of Milwaukee, in my opinion, was the late Chris Farley. Well, he went to. He went to Marquette, but. And. And he, you know, he. No, no, no, no. Actually, no, he did go to Marquette. And also, I thought. Or Wisconsin. I know Tommy Boy. He would. Oh, he went to uw, but Tommy Boy went to Marquette. I think that's what it was. The movie Tommy Boy. He went to. He went to Marquette. All right, Dusty, I'll give it to you that, you know, people in the Midwest, they have scrappier humor because we need to have it right. Cause it's so gosh darn cold there.

It's a survival mechanism.

It's survival. So, Dusty, at the end of every podcast, I always like to include one indestructible PR tip. It's that one takeaway that someone can learn from a podcast that will help them kind of create this indestructible brand. We had talked about, you know, that edgy Persona on Twitter. What is the takeaway for someone listening, whether they work in communications or they're running a business right now? What's that big takeaway when it comes to being that edgy, sassy person on Twitter?

I think it is to have those guardrails and know to abide by them. But I'm actually. I'm gonna challenge the assertion that edgy is the way to go in 2022 here, Molly. And maybe this is a cut against the grain, but I think it's worth talking about because. Because at the end of the day, edgy isn't necessarily about pissing people off. Edgy is about doing something different, is about doing something that hasn't been done. And so now that all of the brands on Twitter are edgy, are making your mama jokes, are telling people to eat ass, maybe the way to succeed on Twitter in 2022 is not to be mean edgy. Maybe edginess in 2022 is in being wholesome. And I'm just speaking for myself here, but radical empathy and being as nice as humanly possible. Maybe this is a Midwest thing. Maybe I am just tired and worn out from all of the meanness that we have seen in this world over the last half a decade here. But I think that the way to really, really make waves on social media is to be edgy in your wholesomeness. And I'll end with this example here. One of the big tweets from the end of 2021 that made a lot of waves and was actually recognized as a tweet of the year by Twitter came from Nick Jr. Do you remember Nickelodeon, the children's TV network on cable? And of course, as a millennial, I grew up with Nick Jr. And some of the shows there, but there was a show that as an elder millennial, I was too old to really get into, but it was called Blue's Clues.

Right, okay, hold on, Dusty, because when you talked about Nick Jr. At the beginning of the podcast, we talked about trauma from the past, and Nick Jr. To me, brought me back to four kids watching Nick Jr. Every day in the background. So a big portion, like a decade of my life was all the Nick Jr. But yes, go on. I do remember it, but go on.

As an elder millennial, I came up during the Rugrats era, the Rocko's Modern Life, the Ren and Stimpy. Like, these were all shows that were on TV then. And then when my little sister was of this age, there was a show called Blue's Clues. It was about a dog, an animated dog, and his live action friend Steve. And they went through and they found clues and they solved mysteries. Yeah, it was really kind of sappy, feel good stuff. Well, anyway, Steve from Blue's Clues jumped back on the Nick Jr. Twitter account to recognize the 25th anniversary of Blue's Clues being on TV. And it was nothing that was deliberately funny or mean or in your face. It was Steve adopting the Persona again of this feel good, wholesome kids show character, talking to now grown adults who had watched the show as a kid about going to college and getting a job and starting a family and how it hasn't always been easy, but you've tried your best and you've done really well. And he ended by saying, and I never forgot you and the lessons that we had along the way. And you look great, by the way. Whatever you're doing, it's working. And that was the tweet, that was the video, and it blew up on millennial Twitter. And I think that if you're gonna be edgy in 2022, as we are all worn out and exhausted from the pandemic and the politics and all the toxicity, I think the way to be edgy is to embrace that wholesome vibe. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just projecting what I want and what I'm hungry for. But. But I'll say this. One of my favorite tweets from. From 2021 was Giannis Antenta Kumpo, NBA MVP, star of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team. And the morning after they won the NBA title, he livestreamed it as he went through the drive through with the NBA trophy in his lap and just wanted some Chick Fil A. That was it. Giannis wanted 50 pieces of chicken because he had shot 50 points the night before. The Instagram video was reblogged just a million times. I think somebody calculated that he created $294.8 million in brand value for Chick Fil A on that day. And Chick Fil A's Twitter account never responded. Missed opportunity, Molly. And if they had embraced wholesome Twitter, they would have been rolling in it.

They missed it. Maybe it happened on a Sunday. And that's the problem. They weren't working. But look at you, Dusty, bringing it, you know, dropping in your Milwaukee Bucks bomb in there, yet you're sitting there in your Green Bay hoodie with, you know, being led by Aaron Rodgers. And how. How's Aaron Rodgers for your good guy branding? Not to take your thesis off the rails, but. Okay, we'll. We'll leave you right there, Mr. Wisconsin, with all your sports analogies there. Yeah, that's another podcast for another day.

Whoa.

Aaron Rodgers.

I'm just gonna warm my. I'm gonna keep myself warm in this zero degree weather by standing next to that dumpster fire. Molly, hey, it's been great. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. You know, we really appreciate that here in Milwaukee, and it's just been a real pleasure. We love what you do.

Oh, my gosh. Well, Dusty, thank you so much for talking to us about brand Twitter and being edgy and not being edgy. And, you know, I like, in the end, what you're saying is maybe a little Minnesota nice goes a long way on social media.

I think you're right, Molly. And hey, get home safe and watch out for deer, okay?

All right. You betcha. Thanks for talking to us.

Thanks, Molly.

That's all for this week's podcast. My thanks to Dusty Weiss from podcamp Media for joining me. There's more information about Dusty and his work in the show notes, as well as a link to my interview with him on his Lead Balloon podcast. Bye for now.