It appears as though some institutions are using interns to man their Twitter stations, as picked up by the Big Money Blog at Slate.com — Pizza Hut, in particular has had some success with their own intern: she’s grown their subscribership from 3000 to 13000 and has managed a 4th of July promotion.

A cautionary note is rung by the author, who mentions the danger of unmonitored staffers;

How much trouble can 140 characters really stir up? A lot, it turns out. In London, a twittering intern for home-furnishings retailer Habitat got in big trouble last month after he sent out misleading tweets that included commonly searched words related to the protests in Iran. He added keywords—called “hashtags” in Twitterspeak—such as Iran and Mousavi to messages so that people who searched for information about the protests would see his employer’s ads instead. His bosses were not pleased. “This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat,” a representative said in a statement. “We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused.” Habitat has since deleted the tweets and vowed to “do better for the Twitter community.”

Ethically challenged marketing maneuvers?  Sounds like an issue of management, rather than the age or inexperience of the individual in question.

Furthermore, lest us all forget, marketing gaffes can happen with even the most seasoned of pros — the transient and off-the-cuff nature of Twitter can sometimes lend to inadvertent messages that are, quite frankly, off-message.  Imagine a ‘reply-all’ email goof which happens with about 100x easily and you’ll get what happened with Steve Rubel, PR new media maven, a few years ago:

Rubel had to publicly apologize yesterday to Jim Louderback, Editor in chief of PC magazine, for twitting that he threw PC magazine in the trash. Louderback wondered aloud in a guest column on Strumpettethat perhaps his 11 million readers were not important to Edelman clients and maybe PC magazine should boycott all Edelman pitches.

Twitter, is a powerful tool. Ghost twitterers and corporate tweets alike, however, have to be mindful of of mistakes that can happen in an instant, and that, thanks to the powerful indexing cache of Google, these internets don’t forget.