Salsa Brand Stirs Up 2013's Biggest Social Media Disaster By Auto-Favoriting Every Tweet That Mentions It

We've written about our fair share of social media catastrophes, but it's possible the Cambell Soup Company-owned salsa brand Pace Foods has suffered the worst one yet.

What would become a long, drawn-out saga began when the stand-up comedian Kyle Kinane (@kylekinane) realized that the brand's (now deleted) twitter account, @Pace_Foods, had favorited a tweet he wrote in January chastising the brand for advertising that poked fun at its competitors on the grounds that their customers weren't as manly as Pace's.

He soon realized that the Pace account, which is unverified, was automatically favoriting every tweet that mentioned the brand (Caution: foul language ahead).

Kinane experimented with a few more tweets insulting Pace, all of which you can see on Kinane's Twitter feed, and all of which were favorited by the brand.

And that's when things got weird. Pace apologized publicly for "technical problems with our Twitter account," and began interacting with Kinane directly.

Pace offered to send Kinane free salsa in exchange for him deleting the tweets. The negotiations became increasingly bizarre as they developed, with Pace ultimately offering Kinane the bottles merely as a gift.

Things continued to devolve as the Pace team brought in a new employee to replace Miles and Eric, the employees that had initially interacted with Kinane. That's when things really spiraled out of control. See for yourself:

The whole ordeal ended in the only possible conclusion: Pace shutting down its Twitter account. In tweets that have since been deleted, Pace clarified that Miles was not fired, and that a second employee pretended to be him on Twitter (even setting up a fake personal Twitter account) in an attempt to get Miles fired.

The old saying goes that "no publicity is bad publicity," but it looks like Pace is putting that theory to the test. If you're interested in an an even more exhaustive play-by-play of the whole ordeal, check out Kinane's twitter feed @kylekinane.