The American Red Cross came to its own aid Wednesday, disarming a potentially embarrassing tweet with humor and demonstrating how social media crises need not be debilitating.

The trouble started late Tuesday, when Red Cross social media specialist Gloria Huang sent the following rogue tweet out on the organization's Twitter feed:









Wendy Harman, social media director for the Red Cross, says the tweet stayed up for about an hour. Harman says she got calls in the middle of the night about the incident and took the tweet down.

Huang, who could not be reached for comment today "feels horrible about it," Harman says. In a later tweet on her personal Twitter feed, Huang blamed the gaffe on her lack of facility with Hootsuite — the message was meant for her private account:







While some blogs picked up the initial tweet, the Red Cross averted a PR crisis with the following good-humored tweet which acknowledged the mistake:







Meanwhile, the subject of the original rogue tweet, Dogfish Head, has also acknowledged the incident by asking fans to donate to the Red Cross.







While the Red Cross recovered nicely from the incident, Harman says that if the original tweet had been more damaging, like along the lines of Kenneth Cole's #Cairo tweet earlier this month, then it might have been a different story. But Huang's original post was no big deal, she says. "We are an organization that deals with life-changing disasters and this wasn't one of them," says Harman. "It was just a little mistake."

[via @PRsarahevans]

Image courtesy of redcrossnj.org