Sounds fine enough (if you’re an old school marketing department writing the book on how not to do social media marketing), but the outcry from the Twitterati, which has its fair share of would-be social marketing consultants, was predictably vociferous.

Habitat apologised, saying it was “totally against our communications strategy” and explaining: “This was not done by an agency. The hashtags were uploaded without Habitat’s authorisation by an overenthusiastic intern who did not fully understand the ramifications of his actions. He is no longer associated with Habitat.” Fingers burned, it still plans to use Twitter for social media marketing.