Tuesday Tweet is a weekly look at interesting fodder from our Twitter stream. Follow us at @HellermanComm.

Today’s tweet comes from Beltway colleague Brian Lustig, who posted some timely thoughts about social media and corporate apologies on his blog. Timely, we say, given the firestorm over Lowe’s recent Facebook-issued apology regarding its decision to pull advertising from a TLC show.

Brian makes some good points, including the observation that social-media platforms are not always the best for CEO mea culpas. Social media seems to offer greater message control than, say, a morning-show interview (after all, you can tweak that statement or video to your heart’s content before pushing it out over social media). But as Brian notes, that control is somewhat illusory, as social-media environments also encourage sharing and commenting from the public. While that makes social media a great place to offer up content displaying your professional expertise, when used for an apology over a sensitive issue, it can also leave a corporation with 28,000 politically charged comments from angry customers.

The appropriateness of social media for any given corporate apology depends on the particular circumstances of each case. Brian is certainly correct, however, that companies should always take into account the degree of formality they’d like to approach the issue with (social media is almost inherently informal), the anticipated reaction (open comment sections and politically sensitive subject matter don’t go well together), the appropriate corporate source (the bigger the issue, the more likely the message needs to come from the CEO), and whether a large enough percentage of a customer base has been affected to require a public message.