On March 21st 2006 Jack Dorsey typed ‘just setting up my twttr’ in to his computer –back then the Twitter prototype was only an internal messaging service for employees of odeo.com. However, from small acorns a mighty oak has grown and while it may polarise opinion there is no escaping the fact that Twitter is a tool we should all be aware of, both for generating positive PR and avoiding the negative.

So in the spirit of learning from mistakes, here are my three favourite Twitter nightmares:

The Ironic

James Andrews had just landed in Memphis and was about to make his way to the head offices of FedEx to do a presentation on the subject of digital marketing. Finding a spare moment he decided it would be wise to tweet the following: “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say ‘I would die if I had to live here!”

A FedEx employee who also happened to be passionate about his home city saw this tweet and proceeded to send it on the management of FedEx and James Andrews’ employers.

Lesson learned: Don’t publically post anything you wouldn’t be happy for everyone to see.

The Distasteful

Earlier this year Habitat decided to spam all the popular hashtag groups by sending a tweet asking members to join their database. While this is a digital marketing faux pas on its own, the online onslaught was worsened when, along with spamming hashtags including the likes of ‘apple’ and ‘iphone’ they also hit tags relating to the unrest in Iran.

To cap it all they then blamed it on an ‘overenthusiastic intern’, letting the world know that Habitat holds its digital marketing strategy with such high regard that they are happy to farm the work off to a temp.

Lesson learned: Spamming is bad, especially when you capitalise on tragic events. Also, your tweets are part of your identity, be careful who you trust with them.

The Poorly Edited

Daniel O’Brien is a journalist for cracked.com, a comedy website with a leaning towards geek culture. In his March blog he had to admit that even he had fallen foul of Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Instead of typing, as he wanted to: “I know it’s weird because it’s been out of theatres for a while, but I’ve got nothing better to do, so I’m sitting around watching that Liv Tyler movie, The Strangers, because I haven’t seen it, and I’m eating popcorn, because I’m hungry.”

He hurriedly knocked it down to 140 characters and posted this instead: “I know it’s weird, but I’ve got nothing better to do, so I’m watching Strangers. I’m hungry.”

Lesson learned: A glaring reminder to us all when cutting our tweets – they may only be 140 characters long but re-read them just as you would a press release or anything else to be published.

Has anyone got any better examples than these?