Blogging Tips

We all make mistakes. We’re human. But when we make big blunders in public, for all to witness, then it can turn into a pretty ugly situation. Take Tameka Foster, for example, who mistakenly made a private Twitter message public. The estranged wife of Usher Raymond, Foster accidentally sent a Twitter message to her public stream when she meant to send a private, direct message to fellow celeb buddy Star Jones.

In the message, Foster complains about her current lawyer and asks Star Jones for suggestions in her search for a new attorney. As Foster is in the middle of a very public divorce from her superstar husband, the blunder is especially noteworthy and embarrassing.

It’s an easy enough mistake to pull. If you’ve set up your mobile phone to receive SMS Twitter messages, you’ll receive private DMs on your phone. In responding to these messages, you merely hit reply. But you need to put a “D” at the beginning of the message, then the recipient’s name, so Twitter knows this is a private message meant only for one person to see. Without the “D” your message will be posted to your public Twitter stream. It’s a mistake I’ve made several times, though fortunately no private information was exchanged.

But such mistakes remind us that Twitter is a double-edged sword–it’s simplicity makes it a very usable tool, but such simplicity can lead to mindless use and easy mistakes. And if this particular blunder occurs over your mobile phone, sometimes you’re unable to go back and delete the public tweet. If you don’t have immediate access to a computer or you aren’t using a smart phone by which you can pull up Twitter directly, there’s no way to remove that tweet from your public stream.

Even after deleting a mistaken public tweet, that message is still accessible via Twitter search, sites where you’ve redistributed your Tweets (such as FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr), as well as third party Twitter apps that display your tweet updates. Deleting a tweet on Twitter is just one step in many, all of which are manual in your effort to right your wrong.

But as a blogger using a very public tool, how do you protect and maintain your brand in the midst of such a blunder?

• Apologize. Make sure this is public as well. And send a separate, private apology to the person for whom the message was intended.  Your blunder may have gotten them in deep water, too.
• Try to turn your mistake into a laughable event. Use your blunder as an opportunity to really personalize your Twitter updates. You may even get some extra traffic if your blunder was interesting enough for others to retweet or spread around the twitterverse.
• Pay attention to your mobile Twitter activity. If you’re afraid you’ll make this mistake again, turn off your pubic SMS notifications so that the only Twitter-related text messages you receive are private. Now you know you need to put a “D” in front of every Twitter reply you send via your phone. Alternatively, you can simply wait until you’re at a computer to reply to direct messages, or turn off your mobile notifications all together.