The guys and girls at Vodafone UK had a rough Friday afternoon in the office. Instead of pulling a Tiger beer off the drinks trolley while trying to judge the optimum moment to slink inconspicuously towards the exits, they were dealing with that tweet.

If you missed it on Friday (and you must be a Twitter-hating Luddite to have missed it, given the diluvian volume of retweets), someone used the official @VodafoneUK account to profess a sort of mission statement that one generally doesn’t expect a major consumer brand – or any civilized person – to evince. You can click through to see a screen shot of it here – it may be not safe for work where you are.

Vodafone’s reaction was to delete that tweet and spend about an hour @replying people who had tweeted about the faux pas with a series of near-identical, but obviously not copy-and-pasted messages, over and over and over again. It evoked a penitent scouring himself, or (better yet) a chastised Bart Simpson condemned to copy his resolution to better behaviour on the blackboard ad infinitum. One single, generally addressed apology tweet might have been a little better, but @VodafoneUK went back to business as usual pretty quickly. Vodafone’s spokesperson reassured the press that it wasn’t a hack and that the employee responsible for the tweet had been suspended.

That might be the end of the story, but today we’ll see if the Monday-Friday blogging crowd decides to jump in. Mashable haven’t had their go yet (at the time of this writing), and a high-traffic commentator like that could start a second round of criticism.

So what can Vodafone do? Public relations isn’t algebra. There’s no perfect, mathematically arrived-at answer, and there’s a strong argument to be made for doing exactly what Vodafone seems to be doing: letting the story die. Twitter streams move fast and pretty soon the even the awkward string of apology tweets will be buried under Vodafone’s cheerful customer service missives.

The problem that Vodafone faces isn’t that people will think that Vodafone is run by crude homophobes (a few people might look at the tweet and come to that conclusion but that’s probably equal to the number of folks who think that Dick Cheney is a bipedal lizard). The big problem is that Vodafone might not appear to be in complete control of their comms.

That’s not fair – what happened to them might have happened to any company. A couple of similar cases from last year spring to mind: the Domino’s Pizza “nose pick” video, and Habitat’s Iran hashtags. In both cases, some disgusting actions appeared on the Web and embarrassed the employers of those who committed them.

When Habitat’s then-nascent Twitter account had attempted to use the trending Iran elections protests to raise visibility of an in-store promotion, Habitat used a spokesperson to throw an intern under the bus and washed their hands of the problem.

Contrast this response with that of Domino’s Pizza. When a couple of employees posted a video of themselves doing awful, biological things to food, Domino’s online response wasn’t to distance themselves from the violators from the safe remove of a press release. Their CEO J. Patrick Doyle posted a straight-talking YouTube response (removed in the months that followed) to the offending video, clearly demonstrating that the buck stopped with him. The kids were fired (and good riddance, too) but Doyle showed that Domino’s took ultimate responsibility for what had occurred. Stand-up stuff.

This is where Vodafone finds itself now on Monday morning, waiting to see who writes about this. If it’s someone with a big reach and a formidable PageRank posts about that tweet this morning, then they’re going to want to look like they’ve got positive control of their communications.

1. Get someone with a name and a face to talk about that tweet.

The brilliance of Domino’s response was the quick, no-nonsense reaction. Vodafone UK  has a YouTube channel – here’s a perfect chance to use it. Put somebody – the CEO maybe, but the director of comms or whoever was in charge of the Twitter account would probably do great as well. Vodafone has already told reporters that the person in question was suspended, why not put someone forward to personally tell everybody? Taking charge of the story the way Domino’s did might earn them a great deal of positive press.

2. Make sure we can find that response.

Once we’ve gone through the trouble of making that video, publicise the bejeezus out of it. Vodafone doesn’t have any active blogs that I could detect, but posting a link to it on @VodafoneUK is a good start. If traditional outlets like the London free newspapers run the story on Monday morning, that will turn into increased search traffic, so buying “vodaphone twitter” and “vodaphone [toothy, tree-loving rodent]” as AdWords for a couple of days wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.

3. Introduce us to the people running the show.

One of the things I love about Twitter accounts like Microsoft’s Bing is that you get to see exactly who’s running the show. Their visible, accountable Twitter wranglers are identified with mug shots in @Bing’s background image and they sign off each individual tweet. Vodaphone’s Twitternauts are friendly and helpful – but anonymous. If Vodaphone has suspended the guy behind that tweet, that’s all well and good, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the Twitter feed.

Good luck to Vodafone today. We’ll be watching.

Fernando is head of digital media for Ketchum Pleon UK.

Disclosure: None of the brands mentioned in this post are Ketchum Pleon clients, and the points of view expressed are those of Fernando Rizo and not necessarily those of Ketchum Pleon.