If you were using Twitter yesterday then you would no doubt have read about how UK Furniture store Habitat generated a major backlash from the Twitter community.

The whole thing started a few days ago when Tiphereth Gloria from Digitial Tip noticed that Habitat were attaching the latest Twitter Trends hash tags to promotion links they were sending out. They used the terms #iphone, #apple and they even used #iran to capitalize on the current situation in Iran, something which really brought them some unwanted bad press.

According to Digital Tip, they didn’t apologise to followers or try to make amends in any way, they simply deleted the tweets that people had complained about.

During this time they were prepearing their PR reply :

I know people have been waiting for a response tweet from us; we are treating this very seriously and wanted to offer a longer message. We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended.

The top ten 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. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.

It has been really valuable to hear how users would like us to use Twitter and we are determined to do better for the Twitter community.

Claire
Habitat Head Office
London

Habitat seemed to have totally distanced themselves from this whole thing and looked for a scapegoat. They have really messed up but I have to agree with Digital Tip that most people would have been happier if they just put their hands up, said sorry and admitted that they messed up.

This is a classic example of what happens when a company lets someone with no experience with social media look after their social media promotion.