On Thursday morning last week, I saw a Facebook post from Coca-Cola in Spanish or Portuguese and another from Levi’s in French.

I assume that some sort of geotargeting glitch had caused both messages to post worldwide rather than in target markets and native languages. The Levi’s post had no comments, but something interesting developed on the Coca-Cola post.

The comment count was off – the page was blowing up with user reactions, like these:

As you can see, users had pretty strong reactions to a simple post that was simple mistargeted. Within ten minutes, there were 40 comments and more were added every minute, until the post was deleted (or otherwise obscured).

But this isn’t a “gotcha” post or implication that either Facebook or Coca-Cola “failed” in some way. What happened here shows the critical importance of connecting with consumers on their terms and their expectations for content relevance.

Easier said than done, when you’re a brand with global operations with brand fans around the world. So give them what they want.