Over the past 24 hours, lots of publications have reported on a stupid Vodafone employee posting an inappropriate and homophobic message to the company’s Twitter feed.

Perhaps surprisingly, the media didn’t erupt in a frenzy of “social networking is evil” rants, although, inevitably, a number of individuals are claiming they’ll cancel their Vodafone accounts, due to the incident.

Personally, I think such people are idiots. Yes, the comment posted was unsavoury, but I tend to think you find out a lot about a company by how it deals with problems such as this. Vodafone could so easily have established a PR smokescreen, or it could have lied and claimed its feed was hacked. Instead, it told the truth. It said one of its staff (now suspended) had posted the message, and it replied and publicly apologised on Twitter to everyone asking about what had happened.

I don’t have any day-to-day dealings with Vodafone, and so I cannot comment on the quality and standards of the company in general. However, in the manner in which this incident was dealt with, I don’t really see how anyone could have asked for anything more, perhaps bar Vodafone management taking a little more interest in exactly who has access to the (usually very helpful) Twitter feed.