Who was minding the store during Habitat's Twitter-fail?

UK-based home furnishings retailer Habitat is getting pounded pretty heavily for its recent behavior on Twitter -- and rightfully so. It's bad enough to spam the Twitter timeline with heavy-handed advertising messages, but using trending topics hashtags to do it is just plain wrong. The question I have is who was minding the store that day?

As news of civil unrest in Iran began to break recently, Twitter users created hashtags like "#Mousavi" and "#Iran" so tweets associated with the topic would be , easier to find. In a colossal lack of good judgement, Habitat began using the hashtags to draw attention to the company's current sales promotion.

Once Twitter users began to squawk, Habitat rushed to delete the offending tweets and later issued an apology. "The top 10 trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat, "said the company in a prepared statement.

I'm completely at a loss to understand what kind of marketing and sales strategy Habitat employs, and where social media fits into the picture. Do they work with a marketing firm or stay in-house? Clearly, no reputable PR firm would make such a blunder so who was at the controls that day? The company isn't saying.

Who ultimately made the mistake isn't the issue as much as the fact that the company wasn't in control of its marketing message. It also demonstrates Habitat is only using social networking sites as an advertising outlet, not as a way to establish communication with its customers. Apparently, they've outsourced their social networking which, of course, misses its point altogether.

It's exactly this type of behavior that dilutes the value of social media for everyone. Businesses that legitimately use Twitter as a way to keep in touch with customers have to constantly struggle against the assumption that their presence is merely a thinly-veiled attempt to spam the community with ads. It also gives credibility to the notion that the person on the other end of a company's Twitter account may not be involved with the company at all.

There are a lot of reasons to find fault with Habitat's social media gaffe but perhaps the biggest Twitter-fail of all is that it leaves Twitter users not knowing who to trust. Companies need to oversee their Twitter presence just as they do other forms of advertising and public communication. A lot of damage can be done in 140 characters.