What can a brand do to recover from a social media blunder?

1) Bee humble - acknowledge and apologize for the error on socially facing pages (site, FB, TW, LI, Q, etc.)

2) Monitor social chatter on the topic using Radian6, Alerian SM2, CoTweet, Visible, Viral Heat or Social Mention - and identify those who are most upset about it. These technologies allow real-time monitoring of the blogosphere, groups, FB, TW, LI, Q, and other sites, in real-time. A free way to do it (to get a ballpark idea) is SocialMention.com.

3) Directly contact the complaining parties using social media - let them know you heard them, and fixed the problem. Thank them for bringing it to your attention.

--johnjdemarchijr@gmail.com
John DeMarchi

Be honest, be forthright, admit the mistake. People will actually empathize with you if you just put it out there with no pretense and in a humble way as John mentioned above. It also helps if you've been consistent all the way down the line with your content and actions on the web.

This is why I always advocate creating consistent authentic content on blogs, tweets, posts, etc. When people see that you have consistently high quality content and "behavior" - then they will easily forgive a misstep. But if you have NO HISTORY online and you make a mistake - it becomes more difficult to recover and overcome the brandjacking that can happen as the web gets flooded by negative comments.

This is perhaps the biggest reason I give to companies to be active on the web and in social communities. It's a sort of ongoing crisis management.

There are multiple levels of "Blunders"...
A) a typo, a bad link, poor choice of words, bad format, missing image, etc can be addressed like John did above (I love that).... take care of it totally within the sphere of the original activity, a "people-make-mistakes" blunder.
B) Larger blunders, (take the Kennith Cole use of events in Cairo to promote the brand as an example.) require full contrition in a manner 1) appropriate and convincing to the immediate and secondary (and maybe even tertiary) audience. Words are only a start and will ring very hollow in the social media sphere. Physical action, donations, written apologies in multiple media, actions/events & relevant non-profit support may be required. Point out all the positive things the brand/business does, being sure NOT to sound like "...hey look here, aren't we wonderful otherwise, so give us a break..." and ADD to those positives and create enough space in the conversation to allow (encourage) 2nd and 3rd parties to carry the "they are really ok in spite of that" banner for the brand.