Habitat is in the middle of a disapproval-a-thon on Twitter right now, after the company, or someone acting on its behalf, added Iranian election hashtags to tweets about its “totally desirable Spring collection”.

Well, the idea was to attract attention, so it worked. In a way.

To its credit, the company’s already made a pretty frank apology:

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.

With new tools like Twitter there will always be mistakes made and decisions taken that, in retrospect, look absolutely, completely bonkers.

Everyone will get better at it. Either that, or they will be bombarded by waves of furious, succinct abuse until they leave, tail between their legs.

Every man and his dog is on Twitter now, blabbing away about the most mundane aspects of their lives without a care in the world (and, before you track me down and ridicule me in a comment, I include myself in that), but companies have to be more careful.

They cannot afford to hand over control of an official Twitter account to someone who doesn’t understand their brand, ethics and customers perfectly.

Google does it very well, throwing in a blend of news, tips and links, and has grabbed the attention of almost a million followers because of it.

Associated Press has also made some effort to avoid controversy (even if it doesn’t have a large social media presence) by releasing a set of guidelines for its staff to follow when online. It includes this little gem, complete with spelling errors:

When tweeting, remember that’s there a big difference between providing an observation (”I nearly bumped into Chris Matthews outside Penn Station”) and an opinion (”I nearly bumped into the loudmouthed and obnoxious Chris Matthews”).

Exactly what the right marketing formula is online will vary from firm to firm, but from this day on it’s pretty clear that leaping on to a distributed, grassroots attempt to help an oppressed and struggling people in order to flog sofas won’t be it.