Twelpforce? Best Buy, You Really DO Want Me To Hate You.

I was just sitting here on my ass, halfway watching the TV and contemplating on whether or not to switch to a gin and tonic, a maitai or stick with the beer when I saw some young gal standing in front of a stadium of blue clad people.  Always intrigued by cults, I paid attention.  And then she asked about cell phones and then cult was yelling at her about having plans and then something about the future . . .  and then I saw they were running their fucking Twitter page – calling it Twelpforce.

For fuck’s sake.

Few things make me want to climb a clock tower and start picking off people wearing blue polo shirts than the insistence of people on the Twitter cutesying the fucking vernacular up by adding fucking “tw” to every noun, verb, pronoun, adjective and adverb.  Yes, part of that last sentence would have read ” . . . tweeple on the Twitter twutesying the twucking twernacular .  . .”.    Pretty fucking annoying, huh?

But nothing takes the cake like a bunch of assholes from some corporate office (I’m looking at you, Best Buy!) jumping in on the act.  I can just see their fucking boardroom now:

Biff:  Hey, this Twitter thing seems popular with the youngsters! How do we take advantage of this?

Sven:  Well, Biff, we’re getting ready for a new push on our cell phone plans.  And people on Twitter, or, catch this – Tweeple! – will follow anything! Especially if it’s on television!  We can advertise our cell phone plans on TV, talk about us “helping” them with other home tech questions, and get these cwazy Tweeple to follow it and have an avenue for annoying the holy piss out of them only the way a mindless, bandwagon jumping corporation can!  And to give it the air of being useful, and getting us some “tweet cred” with the tweeples, we could call it “Twelpforce”! Get it? Twelpforce instead of Help Force?  Because it’s on Twitter!

Biff:  Great idea! Let’s get our best “tweeple”, heheheh, on it!  I’ll start getting our creative team on the television ad!

Sven:  Biff, don’t you mean “twelevision”?  Get it? Twelevision!

Biff:   Oh, Sven! You card!

And then these two assholes go off to the strip club to sniff a little cocaine and get lapdances, which somehow ends up with them in a hotel room together and some very embarrassing photos making it back to their wives.  But I digress.  Nothing makes a company look like a gigantic jackass than taking a ham-handed approach to appealing to a core audience of a specific outlet.  Sure, it makes sense for them to get Geek Squad involved in this and developing their core brand a little further.  And yeah, I can see how seeing other companies do a good job of utilizing the Twitter for building their brand and reaching out to their customer base would appeal to a company like Best Buy, especially if  you consider Best Buy has a spotty customer service reputation at best.  And it certainly makes sense that a gadget retailer would try to reach out to early adopters, though, to do that they should have been on the Twitter two years ago.

Jumping in now, with a fucking “cute” name just smacks of douchebaggery.  While I’m sure they’ll get plenty of people following them, which will make them the perfect fodder for other Best Buy marketing messages, I have a feeling this isn’t going to have the desired effect they intended.  It just seems like it’s too little, too late, too obnoxiously.  But what the hell do I know?  They already have over 4,000 followers.