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.