Talentsmart produces a top 10 list of emotional intelligent moments. They are very fun and interesting. The first one is about email and Jobs.

“In September, Chelsea Isaacs, a journalism student at Long Island University, emailed Jobs’ personal (and publicized) email address with a complaint. Isaacs had left six voicemails with Apple media relations, requesting that they return her call to answer questions about the iPad for a class project. Apple never called. Jobs sent a quick reply to Isaacs’ longwinded email: “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.”

Most people would have been tickled to receive a reply from the billionaire, but not Chelsea. She shot back a terse message that questioned the company’s customer service philosophy, and the two had a flaming six-message exchange that ended with this from Jobs: “Please leave us alone.”

The impact of Jobs’ statement? As one would expect from a journalism student, Isaacs took the exchange public, and it hit the ground running in the blogosphere, eventually getting picked up by several media outlets, including CNN. As Jobs is no fan of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, he undoubtedly paid no attention to Bezos’ revision of an old customer service adage: “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” Isaacs did that and more.

Regardless of whether or not Isaacs was overstepping her bounds in asking the company for help with a class project (which is debatable), Jobs did himself and his company a disservice by engaging in a tit-for-tat email exchange with a customer (Isaacs raves about the Apple products she owns in her first email). Jobs’ approach to Isaacs was bad form for any member of a company, let alone the CEO who lives under a microscope. A bit more self-awareness and Jobs’ would have realized that he was fighting a rational battle with Isaacs but losing an emotional war. With more social awareness, Jobs could’ve had the foresight to see how this simple email exchange might turn into the very public message that Apple doesn’t appreciate its customers. Maybe next time, Steve will read our article on Emotionally Intelligent Emailing before he hits “Send.”