Do you know what tactics your PR team are using in social media?

UK furniture giant Habitat clearly doesn’t and it just cost them a huge reputation blackeye in the Twitter community.

Digital Tip spotted Habitat’s official Twitter account apparently spamming Twitter by placing popular “trending topic” hashtags alongside its own (poorly crafted) tweets.

They even tweeted hashtags used by those protesting the Iranian election, so you can imagine the backlash they’d receive, right?

Well, apparently Habitat was blissfully unaware of the whole scandal. In an open apology letter to the Twitter community, “Claire” from Habitat’s Head Office alluded to the fact the hashtag use had not been approved:

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.

Er, yes it was. Unless someone hacked into your Twitter account, you did authorize the use of those hashtags. Whether it was explicit or not, that doesn’t matter. If an employee or outside