Now here's a great story illustrating how social media can quickly take a bad situation and make it worse by exposing it to a massive, global audience, and how someone then LEVERAGED social media to come back on top - bigger than ever.

During the recent Miss Teen USA pagent, Miss Carolina made a huge gaff on-air. Yes, it was nationally broadcast, but as we know, TV audiences are dwindling, so it's once and done, right? Enter youtube. By Monday, the clip had so much traction, it was even picked up by Gawker Media sports site Deadspin.com. The video on Deadspin alone generated almost 25,000 views. On Youtube, nearly 8 million people have viewed the clip. And those are just two of the many websites who posted the clip. In a matter of a days, a bad interview got much much worse.

Now this is where Miss Carolina (or her management team) proved she's not as simple-minded as she sounded. Instead of allowing herself to be the butt of blog jokes and late night show banter and fade into oblivion, she joined forces with a credible and visible third party, People.com, and poked fun at herself, virally.

Suddenly, she's laughing with everyone.

One of the most important things to remember when responding online via social media is to have a sense of humor. It's important to understand the tone online: irreverent, cheeky, snarky and quirky. While I rarely recommend a snarky tone for a response online, because it has to be done right and can read as defensive in a response, I do recommend being playful and picking a safe channel to host a response, both of which, Miss Carolina did. Well done.

One last note, I acknowledge that not every crisis or gaff is appropriate to respond to via social media and humor. Of exception would be incidents like product recalls of serious consequence to consumers, like the recent toy recall, a pharma crisis or a pending litigation.

**Thanks to Jeremy Pepper for tweeting the the link to the People.com video.

I'm on vacation! The weather is dismal.

Nevermind that, please subscribe to the new Philly Social Media Calendar. After BlogPhiladelphia, many of us in the local community realized that we had been segmented by our individual networking groups and we wanted continue the momentum of meeting as a larger community. Ergo, the birth of this calendar. Many thanks to my partner in Social Media Club Philly, Steph Fox, who created this tool.

Who's excited?!?! Mememememe!!!

I'm going to BlogOrlando! Have you registered yet? Well, what the heck are you waiting for???

Knowing Josh Hallett, it's going to be filled with great sessions, smart people and chock full of learnings. Oh, did I mention I'll be leading a session? Yep. I'll be leading a conversation about using social media to market tourism.

I'll be there, Sept 27-29! Hope to see you, too.

Go Philly! We're the second Bloggiest city in the nation! We rule!

Here's a real life of example of why it's important for Corporations/Brands/Service businesses to hire PR experts who live and breathe social media.

Last October, I bought the Verizon Wireless PC Card. I had just moved from out of state and even though I made arrangements a few weeks prior to moving, the local cable provider scheduled my hook-up for their earliest available date, about 2 weeks after my relocation. I was prepared to suck up a TV-less life, but no Internet access for 2-weeks???? Not an option. So I decided to try the PC Card.

Verizon Wireless offered the card with a 10-day free trial. The deal was that if I didn't like the product and returned it within 10 days, I would be fully refunded. Sounded great.

Unfortunately, the card wasn't compatible with my laptop. I returned it within the 10 day timespan, the store stamped my receipt as returned, I didn't have a second thought about it.

Until 6 or 7 months later when the calls started on my cell. I was getting calls from credit agencies, which I ignored, thinking it was a mistake. I've had mix ups before because of a duplicate name. I assumed it was an error.

Then my parents called me. They were getting calls at their home, a residence I haven't resided at for 15 years. Now I was annoyed.

I called the debt collector to find out what this was about. After an hour long conversation, we realized that it was a mistake. He had me call Verizon. I spent another 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon. They saw the error in their system and told me it was corrected. They said the credit agencies would be alerted. I called back the credit agency and relayed the information.

For the next two months, this cycle was repeated. Two different agencies continued to harrass me via cell phone. I would call Verizon and they would tell me the error was corrected in their system and the agencies were alerted.

Today, I lost it. I spoke with the credit agency at the end of last week! At that time, I called them yet again, explained that the debt was erroneous and Verizon had cleared the account and alerted the agency. Two separate agencies called me twice this morning. Then I checked my credit report and saw that my score was still low, showing this false claim. I grew irate.

I called Verizon and I demanded action. This time they told me that the paperwork had been sent to the collection agencies on June 27th, so the account should be deleted any day now. The rep explained that it took a week or so after the notice was sent for it to show in the collection agency system. "July 27th?" I repeated several times to him. "Yes" he confirmed over and over. I started to laugh. "Today is AUGUST 8TH. IT'S BEEN ALMOST 6 WEEKS SINCE THIS LETTER WAS SENT. WHEN IS THIS GOING TO HAPPEN?"

There was plenty more to this conversation, but we don't need to get into it. That's not the important part here. This isn't Dell Hell.

What happened next is that I was royally ticked and I wanted to tell someone, so I started to Twitter about my war with Verizon. I even went so far to say that I was so angry, I was going to digitally record the calls with Verizon customer service and start posting the mp3's of the stagnant, frustrating conversations online for my readers to listen to. Then I said I was going to pitch the whole terrible story to consumer reporters on TV.

Here's where it gets interesting.

You see, Verizon Wireless, while ticking me off, had the foresight to hire a smart PR team. Immediately after my twitters, I was directly contacted by Jeremy Pepper, one of the smartest blogger/social media professionals in the business. First he asked me what happened and then he empathized with my experience and noted that if this round of calls didn't resolve the problem (it sounded like it will - finally!), he'd be happy to lend help from his side. I was impressed. If Verizon Wireless hadn't aligned with Jeremy Pepper (Disclosure: we've met via industry conferences) and if he hadn't be visible to me as a blogger and someone to follow online...if he hadn't been paying attention on Twitter, I would have launched a debilitating campaign against the company and it may have been too late for him to manage it.

It's not enough in this day and age of citizen journalism and microblogging to have a online monitoring program. Marketers need to acknowledge that the model has changed and the consumer now has a greater share of voice than ever before. Broadband and mobile have enabled huge groups of global consumers to speak to each other like never before. For marketers who don't have the time or the desire to handle this massive communication task internally, this means finding PR partners who live and breathe in this world to handle it for you.

Although my experience with Verizon has been frustrating, I will continue to be their mobile customer, not just because I think their mobile coverage is the best but also because they've invested in a PR team who "gets it" and "engaged me."

My new friend Chris Conley is the good kinda crazy. Last weekend he blogged for 24 hours for charity. I was one of the people he interviewed to create all of that content. We talked about social media here.

Scott McNulty on Blogging from Blogphiladelphia!