Guaranteed you have heard horror stories of Tweets run amok and the damage that can do to your social graph and public persona not to mention your brand. Who can forget Habitat Fail? When an "Intern" caused a severe backlash against their brand for using a #TAG inappropriately.

In Habitats case their wasn't much they could do other than apologise and try and shift blame to someone else, here is the thing though even shifting the blame to the "intern" the Habitat brand took the brunt of negative press, people don't care if it's the CEO making a gooof or a volunteer.

YOUR BRAND is the one tweeting  along with your own personality a potentially explosive combination.

Tips for happy Brand + Personality tweeting:

• Use a :-) smiley to communicate when you are saying something in a lighthearted way
• If you want to separate a brand statement from a personal statement use IMO (In My Opinion)
• If you tweet some one and afterwards realise a mistake or think you may of said something hasty, tweet them again and correct it!
• Never shy away from an apology, we are all learning even the person complaining!
• If you know a tweet is inflammatory add your name and position at the end of the tweet (-John  CEO) so your other staff don't take heat.

Dealing with complaints

Let's look at a fictional exchange centered around a new fundraising campaign by a Charity/Non-profit that has national exposure. The complaint will be on the extreme side but i hope to show a wide range of responses from this.

Non-profit: Make a donation and we can support millions of broken Hair Dryers, Donate £10  RIGHT NOW!
(With only 140 characters and leaving space for Retweets on your core tweet will never be able to contain all your campaigns core statements, leaving followers to read between the lines in some case.)

Complaint: HAIR DRYERS!!! Your kidding me! What a waste of money how can you justify that!
Non-profit: Hi - Even a Hairdryer deserve an Equal chance to live, did you know over 10 million are binned each year?
(This response is designed to state a core position (all hairdryers have a chance) and then a large scale number (10 million binned) The hope would be that by adding more context and information the complainant may settle down and even identify with the cause.)

Complaint: Yes but £10 that's a lot of money for a recession, what are you doing to help them? Seems a waste of time to me.
(As you can see the complainant has softened their tone slightly, you will find this is a very common occurrence as a tweeter gains more information they realise that their initial anger may of been misplaced.)

Non-profit: £10 will refurbish a hairdryer and provide it to a low income family, We agree times are tough, Hence the campaign to help those less well off.
(Time to bring this to a close and turn the complaint around, the above tweet filters the campaign down again to its specifics, it then picks a core part of the users complaint and agrees with it whilst delivering the final part of the campaigns message.)

Complaint: OH! Well I can't afford to help you sorry, may be next time.
(Complaint resolved you can move on to other pressing matters, this entire exchange would of taken place in just a few minutes at most 30 minutes in my experience.)

Complaint: RT @Non-profit:Make a donation and we can support millions of broken Hair Dryers, Donate £10
(This is really what you are looking for, if you can turn a complaint into a supporter then you just got my Gold Award for excellent complaint resolution)

Too Easy?

Some readers may think this example is to easy or obvious but please remember that many who read this site are completely new to Social Media and in particular Twitter and that first complaint or gripe from the community can really shake you to your bones and make you wonder if its worth bothering with Twitter at all.

The thing I love about getting a complaint is being able to turn it around into a positive,  because its public you may find other Tweeters jump to your defence or even side with the complainant. Take it all on board and if you really have messed up (Public opinion is very much against you) Apologise and ask them to feed it all back via email to you so you can look into it and put it right.

A note if your a staff member rather than a decision maker, you need to make sure you have enough scope to make decision and apologise when things do go wrong I would always recommend that a senior staff member or a person in a position of responsibility is in charge or your Twitter sccount. There is nothing more infuriating for a complainant that being told "I'll get back to you when then boss is in"

This isn't a letter or email in 90% of cases the person complaining will want a response there and then and rightly so! If you just tweeted it out you must be around to deal with the responses to that Tweet and have the power to take action or resolve complaints on the spot.

Obviously there are going to be situations where that won't be possible, moving the complaint to email helps to slow down the exchange and gains you more information about the issue at hand. Use Twitter to let the complainant know that you have received the email and are looking into it for them, if you feel you can give them an ETA do so, but remember UNDER PROMISE OVER DELIVER!!! Nothing is worse than a time scale that isn't stuck to, that will get you a:

Complaint: "where the hell is my response been sat here waiting and YOU said I would have it 20 mins ago."

{jb_bluebox}You want to avoid complaints like that, although my tip would be once you have an answer to send them a tweet that it will be with them in the next 2 hours, send it 20 mins later and you look like a Rock Star! :-) Managing expectations is a core part of managing the Twitter experience, it's also one of the greatest {/jb_bluebox}challenges.