Sometimes, mistakes by brands are less life-threatening and more amusing. Take the case of fast food chain Denny’s for instance, which has printed its Twitter feed onto its dinner menus. Or at least what it thought was its Twitter feed.

In fact, any customer that typed in the link provided by the restaurant would in fact have been directed to a the tweets of a Taiwanese man named Dennys Hsieh.

The brand got everything right, asking customers to “Join the conversation!” and making the call to action very clear on the back of its menus in 1,500 locations across the US. Dennys is actually very active on Twitter, separating its tweets into ones for late night customers and one for those that visit for breakfast, with both linking to offers, acting as a customer service resource and providing updates on opening hours.

But since the menus were printed last October, and blogger Matthew Petro highlighted the mistake in November, nothing appears to have been done (though Dennys has apparently asked Twitter to investigate if it can ‘take over’ the inactive account). Now, tech blogg CNET has picked up on the story and it’s become an issue once again.

As Daniel Terdiman points out on the site, this isn’t the first mistake Dennys has made with Twitter, as the brand also decided to create a character-based profile to coincide with Nannerpuss – a dancing banana reminding customers of free egg & bacon offer that featured in 2009’s $3 million Super Bowl ad. Needless to say, the tone and approach of the tweets didn’t work, neither did similar attempts on Facebook to create online conversations with customers.

Though the brands social strategy for 2010’s Super Bowl appeared much more focused (using different channels to engage with core guests in a way that’s engaging and relevant to them), the Denny’s ad didn’t even enter the Brand Bowl top ten. Ad agency Mullen and monitoring company Radian6 kicked off Brand Bowl 2010 (which resulted in over 98,000 tweets containing the hashtag #brandbowl) to look at how various brands performed on Twitter. Of course, Twitter isn’t the be all and end all, but it’s a good benchmark.

With good intentions (if not results) in place for social media, why hasn’t anything been done about the menus? We can all forgive an honest mistake, though the misprint really is so far away from the real details, it’s more likely to be poor proofing and a bit of laziness. This is unlikely to dent the company’s reputation, but for those trying out something new just because Dennys has suggested it, and not because it’s a normal channel of communication – they’re likely to simply shrug and give up. It’s less a loss of customers, and more a waste of what has the potential to be a valuable marketing tool