I'm a big believer in the need to respond quickly to PR problems, but sometimes, the "crsis" isn't as bad as all that. Consider Cotton-On, an Australian clothing maker. They've been putting out a line of t-shirts with slogans of questionable taste for some tme now, and recently, they crossed over from bad taste to stupid, with a "shaken baby" shirt.

Yes, that was a bad idea, as David Meerman Scott notes. However, it doesn't look to me like they've taken any hit at all by ignoring the little Twitter-storm that brewed up (complete with its own hashtag). Doing a Google search for the company, I couldn't find anything negative; the PR storm hadn't escaped Twitter.

Here's the thing to keep in mind about Twitter: as much as the technorati (and a few celebrities) like it, it's still a small scale usage thing. Just because something gets big on Twitter, it doesn't mean that it's going to get big all over. You do need to monitor Twitter for company/product mentions, and you should respond to negative Twitter storms - but not all Twitter storms cross over to become real problems. It looks to me like this one didn't. Tasteless and stupid, yeah. A lingering problem? Not so much.

Technorati Tags: twitter, pr, social media