For the final 11 days of 2011, we’re going to take a look at some of the top mistakes made this year in our industry… including social media, marketing, branding, graphic design, web design and SEO.

American Red Cross created potential Twitter disaster (then recovers)

This one is almost hard to put on the “mistakes list” because it was fixed so superbly. But the truth is, the American Red Cross had a tweet go out that was clearly supposed to go to a different Twitter account.

It’s pretty obvious what happened. This was sent from Hootsuite, which is a social media management site that lets a user manage more than one social media account at the same time. The user clearly meant to click on his or her personal account but it went out over the Red Cross’ account.

The tweet was deleted and posted this follow-up tweet:

There are two lessons here:

1. Be careful when using social media management tools. We try to avoid this by having a separate Hootsuite account for each client and none of our personal accounts are tied together in the same Hootsuite screen as our business accounts.
2. Correct any problems immediately and ‘fess up with a sense of humor. The Red Cross did this very well.