This Tweet’s for You, Dogfish Head

Twitter could probably benefit from a warning label—like “Do not type while drinking”—but one microbrew-loving American Red Cross employee’s accidental tweet this week had a lucky ending, both for her and for a Delaware craft-beer maker.

A woman who handles social media for the Red Cross was using HootSuite Tuesday evening when she tweeted "Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head's Midas Touch beer...when we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd."

It probably would have generated little notice if she tweeted it to her pals as intended. But instead, the woman had mistakenly logged into her work account and tweeted her adventures out to Red Cross’s Twitter followers: all 270,000 of them.

The Red Cross—which should win some sort of employer of the year award for this maneuver—quickly sent out a follow-up. "We've deleted the rogue tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we've confiscated the keys."

As CNN pointed out, it turned into a win for a small business: After Mariah Calagione, Dogfish's vice president of marketing spotted the mistweet during a daily tweet check, she quickly retweeted it to the Milton, Delaware-based brewery's followers. Using the hashtag #gettngslizzerd, others tweeted it out, directing donations to the American Red Cross.

"Before the day was over, Red Cross chapters across the country were actually tweeting about the whole thing, bars were offering to buy Dogfish pints for folks who could show they'd donated blood, Mashable and the Huffington Post picked up the story, and HootSuite (which the Red Cross twitterer was using when she mistakenly posted from her Red Cross account instead of her personal Twitter account) pledged a donation to the aid organization," Calgione wrote on the company blog.

It was the kind of marketing boost that a small brewer with 150 employees couldn't buy, and the Red Cross—which is used to dealing with far greater emergencies—was pleased too. But it did warn generous Dogfish drinkers not to guzzle the free pint too soon after giving blood.

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