Most of us are familiar with “brand Twitter.” Many of us are at least acquainted with the voices of “weird Twitter.” Now these worlds are starting to intersect, as restaurant chains are attempting to sound like cool teens in their tweets, and frozen pizza brands are posting ironically tone-deaf jokes and deliberately cryptic, grammatically dubious sentence fragments.

This can be a disorienting experience for us readers, prompting self-searching questions like: Why am I laughing at a frozen pizza? I buy the frozen pizza, do I have to be its friend, too? On the other hand, brands have always tried to ape the memes and language of pop culture to seem more “relatable.” Is this latest iteration so wrong?

We will discuss the most noteworthy practitioners of weird brand Twitter – skilled and less so – and the implications for how we view brands and the social channels that have become central to our lives.