I’ve been using this when working with clients to come up with an agreement on how we handle older and slower browsers. I’m eager to hear your thoughts on it.

There are two major truths when it comes to in-browser experience:

1. Both we and the client want the most responsive experience possible.
2. Everything added to the page slows it down.

So with these two facts of life, what steps do we need to take so everyone is happy? Onward!

Create success metrics with the client

These should be customized to your client and project and done before the wireframing phase. These goals should be reasonable from a technical POV, as well as testable.

Some goals that would be appropriate:

1. The slowest browser supported must go from an empty cache to fully loaded and initialized within 10 seconds.
2. Hover states (and other ‘instant’ changes) should respond within 300ms.
3. Animations should appear smooth, with jumpiness occurring < 15% of the time (across all browsers).

For load-time based goals, it’s important to define who’s computer and connection this must be done on (e.g. the clients). Additionally, the goal may be defined for multiple pages, for example: the two most popular landing pages (e.g. homepage and support).

If the client has more wants more aggressive goals than are reasonable with the intended design, expectations need to be set with visual and interactive design to keep things more minimal.

Communicating the performance impact during design phase

Internally

During IA, IxD, and visual design, it is the interface developer’s role to communicate the performance impact of interactive features or certain visual techniques on the target browsers. Give the designers constraints: “If we’re using Cufon, we cannot have more than 10 elements of custom font per page.”

Externally

Expectations need to be set that all browsers will not have the same experience. They won’t perform as well as eachother, nor may it make sense to have feature parity.

It may be sensible to drop a few features from the IE6 and IE7 experience. Features that could be considered to be dropped are: shadows, transitions, rounded corners, opacity, gradients.

When communicating the impact of something:

• Clarify the impact with as much detail as possible: “it will hurt page load” vs “it will add 2 seconds to page load in IE”
• Provide a quick POC (proof of concept) if it’s reasonable: “This similar-looking page without siFR loads in 4 seconds, with siFR it loads in 8 and has a delay to show during scrolling”

Develop according to best practices

Choose libraries and plugins that are performance optimized. Make wise architecture decisions based on performance goals. Also minimize DOM manipulation when possible, and write styles to avoid visual changes to the page as it loads and initializes.

Measure performance during QA

QA teams should also prioritize performance related tickets alongside visual, functional, and usability issues. Developers and QA should determine how that priority will be assigned.

During QA, the success metrics should be tested regularly.

Tools to test with:

• YSlow, Page Speed, Hammerhead, MSFast, PageTest

When performance goals aren’t met, there are three options:

1. Redevelop the code – profile, discover bottlenecks, refactor code, optimize to target faster execution in the browser
2. Drop the feature – turn it off for slower browsers only
3. Redesign approach of the UI – perhaps the design could use a tweak which would bypass the issue entirely

With this approach, I think all parties have  a better chance of having aligned expectations heading in as well as a more sensible workflow in dealing with performance challenges.

What do ya’ll think? Realistic?

We’re proud to announce that Paul Irish, a senior consultant on Molecular’s emerging interactions team, has joined the jQuery Developer Relations Team.  Run by a distributed group of volunteers, the jQuery Project is dedicated to making jQuery the best JavaScript library possible.  

Paul joined the jQuery team to help produce videos for the 14 Days of jQuery and to move the API documentation to its new home for the 1.4 release. As a member of the Developer Relations team, Paul will be responsible for ensuring that the expectations of developers are being met in jQuery itself, and helping the core team to communicate clearly and effectively. 

Paul has been an active member of the jQuery community for 3 years, participating in and administrating the jQuery IRC channels and frequently blogging about jQuery and its functionality. He is also a frequent speaker at jQuery events, and the co-creator of the yayQuery podcast. 

Congratulations, Paul!

Want to learn more about the jQuery project? Leave your comments and questions for Paul in the comments section below.

Welcome to the fascinating world of design thinking—a new and extremely effective tool that can be applied to the design of innovation, systems, business processes, and the design of businesses themselves.  In a new book by Design Management Institute president Thomas Lockwood called Design Thinking, Molecular’s Brian Gillespie contributes his thoughts on the importance of design thinking in an essay titled “Service Design via the Global Web:  Global Companies Serving Local Markets.”  

Built on case study examples and work done for Molecular’s clients, Brian examines the challenges and opportunities companies face when launching a global Web presence.  In the essay, Brian critiques a range of options, including gateways, scope, user research, uniform versus local presence, language, content development, design, site implementation, domains, and URLs. 

If your organization is looking to cultivate innovation and build a solid brand foundation, Design Thinking is a must-read! But don’t take my word for it – check out some of these rave reviews: 

“A much-needed book, which paves the way towards a better understanding of design thinking and its power. A fundamental reading for all those who like to grasp the multifaceted nature of design.”
—Roberto Verganti, author, Design Driven Innovation; professor of innovation, Poitecnico di Milano

“This collection of work from some of the design industry’s top thought leaders will further stimulate valuable discussion on how, through collaborative and innovative thinking, we can design a better future for all societies and business.”
—Stefano Marzano, president, Philips Design

Have a question for Brian or want to share your thoughts on design thinking?  Be sure to leave your comments below!

It’s finally here. miCoach has launched in the U.S. and is on sale here for the first time. Get yours now! It’s been a long time coming after three years of working on this project. The screen below shows what the adidas.com USA home page looked like today. Just below that is the newly designed miCoach homepage to coincide with this launch and some new branding/campaign work. Awesome work everybody!

Also, some really nice words about our site design on the FAST COMPANY web site today. These words are music to my ears and illustrate that all of our hard work has really paid off in creating a rich yet easy to use experience. This is much, much harder than it sounds.

• “The Web site, which was created by adidas along with Molecular, does not miss a step–it’s intuitive, fun to use, and keeps pace with almost everything a runner needs.”
• “The Web interface coupled with these devices is often where they trip over their laces, but not in this instance. The miCoach site is easy to navigate, and includes just about everything you need in order to track and improve your running.”
• “The Adidas miCoach Pacer is the most full-featured and enjoyable personal training device on the market.”

Click here to read the full article.

[Originally published on Ricardo Salema's blog.]

I recently caught up on some interesting IxDA threads highlighted below that may interest you as well. Wishing everyone a wonderful and happy new year!

o1. Firefox Home Tab Challenge

IxDA has partnered with Mozilla Labs and Johnny Holland for a design challenge. The submission deadline is February 14 for a concept video explaining how the new Firefox home tab should work. Anyone interested in forming a Molecular team to tackle this??

• The Home Tab Design Challenge Winter ‘09 website: http://design-challenge.mozillalabs.com/winter09/
• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=48090

02. GLIDE ‘10 Call for Papers

This is a biennial virtual conference sponsored by the National Science Foundation and AIGA UP ST NY dedicated to research on topics related to interaction between designers and global communities. The theme this year is cross-cultural collaboration with indigenous and underserved communities. Abstract submissions are due February 15. Conference takes place on October 27.

• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=48057

03. Google’s Above-the-Fold App

This new app let’s you see in a transparent gradient kind of way which parts of your site is viewable by percentile.

• Enter any URL into Browser Size to see the map: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=48056

04. Shopping/ecommerce trends

Someone asked the group about what trends people were seeing with online shopping and here were the recommended resources:

• Pew Internet research topic of “Shopping”: http://www.pewinternet.org/topics/Shopping.aspx
• Webinars and resources on www.shop.org (requires membership)
• A recent book called Shoptimism by Lee Eisenberg
• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=47953

o5. Andrew Daniels on uxSEARS

A virtual meeting featuring the UX director of Sears hosted by IxDA Chicago called “The $50 Billion Startup Revolution and How UX Leads the Way”:

• Video, also embedded below: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2588473 (7:50 to skip past housekeeping stuff)
• Presentation slides in PDF: http://tinyurl.com/ykkn6vn
• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=47718

By now, marketers know that brands cannot fully control their own message anymore. Consumers now have a diverse set of channels through which they can interact with their digital world, and they’ve taken rightful ownership of their own destiny when interacting with brands through those channels.

In an effort to be heard and to increase engagement, brands are turning to new, innovative ways to approach the digital marketing landscape, from social environments such as Twitter and Facebook, to blogger outreach and global alternate reality games. Like anything else new and innovative, the risk of failure in these approaches runs high, and the payoff is unknown.

But failure, if done early and often, can be more instructive than success. Let’s look at four new and innovative ways that brands attempted to engage with their consumers through digital, and see what lessons we can learn.

Lesson 1. Tell a story, but make it your story
In February 2008, 50 bloggers and gamers received mysterious packages in the mail containing clues to an online alternate reality game (ARG) with a clear call to action: Find “The Lost Ring.” These packages kicked off a six-month effort across the globe by more than 150,000 players in seven languages to uncover a lost Olympic game. The game officially ended at the Beijing Olympics, and it generated more than its share of accolades in marketing circles.

But that’s only half of the story. The game is a classic example of what’s known as “dark marketing” — a viral campaign in which the sponsoring brand (in this case, McDonald’s) is barely, if ever, acknowledged. The theory is that mentioning the brand would turn potential gameplayers off when they realize that they’re simply playing a part in a larger marketing campaign. In this case, it wasn’t revealed that McDonald’s was participating until months after the game began.

ARGs have proven to be successful in the past and are an incredibly viral method of participatory storytelling on a grand scale. Yet in most cases where measurable success was achieved, the ARG told a story that was at least tangentially related to the brand that sponsored it. Consider ABC’s “Lost Experience” and “Find815″ ARG campaigns, which gave rabid fans of the hit show something to do during its hiatus while simultaneously telling some of the show’s back story — all without diminishing the experience of watching “Lost” for consumers who didn’t participate. 
 

BMW created an ARG surrounding a fictional town, “Oberpfaffelbachen,” that built a huge ramp up to launch the BMW 1-Series in America. In each of these cases, the story of the game tied back to the story of the brand, even if the tie-in was slight or tongue-in-cheek.

Lastly, in order to measure the success of an ARG, it’s important to understand how the brand is perceived before, during, and after the game. Using sentiment analysis tools to continually measure what people are saying about the brand can identify the baseline sentiment and the brand lift during the campaign, as well as any lingering effects after the game has ended.

Lesson 2: Turn the chairs inward (and take a seat)
It’s become a marketing cliché: Your consumers are talking, and your brand is the topic of conversation. In an effort to show that they understand this, Skittles decided to bring that conversation to the fore in the guise of its official website, which it replaced with an unsupervised Twitter feed that showed every tweet mentioning the Skittles brand. At the same time, the brand allowed website visitors to switch between its Wikipedia page, YouTube account, and other social media outposts using a simple widget. Within 48 hours, the messages on Twitter were littered with expletives.

Skittle’s parent company, Mars, had a great idea, but while it exposed conversations around the brand to the bright, harsh light of day, the company neglected to participate in it.

By participating, Mars could have managed the conversation around its brand, instead of letting it spin out of control. Consider what Pepsi did with the “Pepsi Cooler“ on FriendFeed, a social media aggregator now owned by Facebook. Pepsi managed the conversation through multiple social media channels partly by taking a seat at the table and participating as an equal contributor.

Lesson 3: Behave Yourself
My iPhone is the most personal of personal technology devices. It’s always on my person, it’s always on, and it contains my contacts, calendar, and music; it’s my life in my pocket. It makes perfect sense that a smartphone app can be a great way to increase engagement with consumers.

But remember, when in the personal space of your consumers, it’s vital that you follow their rules of etiquette. Pepsi released an iPhone application to support its AMP energy drink that was designed to help make male customers more successful with the ladies. The app categorized women into types, and it offered pick-up lines targeted to those types. The backlash was so great that Pepsi yanked the risque app from the App Store and offered a public apology.

Mobile apps have been a great way to create a service out of a brand. Molecular worked with Nikon on an app that helps its consumers take better photos, regardless of whether they own a Nikon camera or not.

When you engage with consumers on their turf, on a device as personal as their mobile phones, make sure that service is helpful. To Pepsi’s credit, it admitted the mistake, but it could have been avoided by understanding how far it could take the joke without offending its audience.

Lesson 4: Keep the circle of trust intact
Reaching out to influential bloggers is a great way to generate buzz around a new product launch. The best bloggers will give a fair and honest review of the product, thereby extending the trust that these folks have established with their loyal audience to your brand.

When ASUS reached out to bloggers to review the new Eee PC 901 laptop, it was counting on that trust. But instead of simply letting the bloggers review the product, they made it a competition. They chose six bloggers to write a minimum of three 200-word posts a week about their laptop over the course of four weeks. The blogger with the most readers would win the laptop.

ASUS didn’t expect what happened next: The blogger with the most readers wrote a review that, while honest and fair, wasn’t exactly favorable to the product. So ASUS changed the rules. Instead of the most readers, the winner of the laptop would be chosen by a vote taken by the six bloggers themselves, resulting in another blogger winning in the end. The readers revolted by posting scathing comments on the announcement of the winner.

Product ratings and reviews work because they are written by the folks consumers trust most: other consumers. When a brand tries to game the system, this breaks the circle of trust. Instead of changing the rules, Asus might have been better off thanking the winner for his review, acknowledging (or defending, when necessary) the product’s limitations, and working the feedback into future products.

Conclusion
There are so many new ways of interacting and engaging with consumers today. Their conversation is fragmented, their attention span short, and their tolerance for BS is low. Without well-established roadmaps for success, it is inevitable that we will sometimes fail when attempting to engage with consumers in new and innovative ways. But by learning from failure, we are left with enormous potential to provide exceptional brand experiences that do succeed.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]

It’s been a busy summer, which transitioned into a busy fall. The Thanksgiving break gave me an opportunity to chip away at the stack of New Yorker magazines that have accumulated on my nightstand. John Colapinto’s “Lunch with M,” from the November 23, 2009 edition, in which he tags along with a reviewer for the New York edition of the Michelin Guide, got me thinking about how brands should be thinking of themselves as as service:

Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a flat.

At Molecular we are passionate about helping brands provide real, valuable, sustainable service to their consumers. As the Michelin Guide proves, this isn’t a new concept at all. And it seems to have worked out pretty well for them:

Michelin has grown into one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world, a company more than three times the size of Goodyear.

I’ve come up with the following four components that I believe are necessary for a brand to execute a successful service:

1. Deep value: Automobile owners needed a way to find out where to go and how to get there. Michelin provided this for free (initially). The few motorists at the time were given a valuable asset to plan trips, and to maintain their vehicle, and to find reliably good food on the road. As more motorists took to the road, Michelin added the three-star system to denote exceptional cooking. Taking to the road seemed safer with the Guide.
2. Sustainable value: In the preface to the first edition of the guide, André Michelin wrote: ”This work comes out with the century; it will last as long.” There are now other guides, including the survey-based Zagat guide and the crowdsourced Yelp, but chefs in Europe still live by – and die by -  the Michelin Guide. A few years ago, the Guide launched in the United States (in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco)
3. Edge Business: Michelin’s core competency is in producing high quality tires. The Michelin Guide complemented that business by providing its consumers a reason to drive – it lives at the edge of Michelin’s brand proposition, as opposed to the center.
4. Openness: You don’t need to drive around on Michelin tires to use the guide.

I’m curious to hear what you think – what else makes a brand service-oriented?

There is a formal proposal to introduce closures to the Java programming language. For those of us who have been in the Java world for a while (10+ years for yours truly) this could really open up a lot of interesting possibilities to express solutions to really complicated problems, the way the functional programmers have been doing things, which can mean, less and cleaner code.

For example, anonymous functions, and first-class functions would be introduced as well as incorporating some of the more interesting features of languages like ruby (think blocks and yield) and scala will make for more concise code and, as an example, provide the developer with the ability to write your own control structures.

From the (current) specification:

“Modern programming languages provide a mixture of primitives for composing programs. Most notably Scheme, Smaltalk, Ruby, and Scala have direct language support for parameterized delayed-execution blocks of code, variously called lambda, anonymous functions, or closures. These provide a natural way to express some kinds of abstractions that are currently quite awkward to express in Java. For programming in the small, anonymous functions allow one to abstract an algorithm over a piece of code; that is, they allow one to more easily extract the common parts of two almost-identical pieces of code. For programming in the large, anonymous functions support APIs that express an algorithm abstracted over some computational aspect of the algorithm.”

This is pretty exciting for Java, and as a fan of functional programming, this is a real bonus for the Java platform.

Co-authored by Yuval Zukerman, Sr. Consultant, Emerging Interactions, Molecular

Social media has come to play a key role in brand messaging, with the strong two-year climb of microblogging service Twitter adding a new twist: a 140-character limit. This restriction has pushed adoption of a few common ways to cram more message into less space. Apart from heavily leveraging the new language of texting shorthand born of the mobile SMS, the biggest trend in use is employing short URLs to save space while linking to other online content.

Short URLs are hinged on service providers like tr.im and TinyURL that allow people to generate unique links, usually formed of a small domain name followed by a hash and a series of apparently random characters that the service provider responds to with a redirect to the longer target link. For example, the provider tr.im may provide a link of the form http://tr.im/zpBD that points visitors to http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/category/data-and-analytics/, saving us 48 characters to talk about how insightful the latest blog post is.

The advantages to end users are clear enough, but the disadvantages to content providers are not. Cautionary tales of short URL service collapse have been floating around for years, but the message doesn’t mean much to the people socializing those millions of YouTube videos and Flickr photos. The people contributing all that traffic to your site aren’t as concerned as the marketing department with how long the link stays around; the internet zeitgeist waits for no one. As marketing professionals, here are a few things you should know to help you better understand short URLs and why you should consider owning your own short URLs to power your brand.

1. Find short domains that evoke your brand
Your brand is your company’s face in the market, and the more exposure it gets, the bigger your potential audience. With social media, you’re focusing on name recognition for you and your offerings. Much the same way you may come up with a smaller version of your logo for different ads to fit the space and medium, URL shortening provides you with a short link that drives users to the page with the full, long URL. For example, instead of using long URLs with user-friendly information, like http://www.amazon.com/User-Always-Right-Practical-Creating/dp/0321434536, you will be providing a short link such as http://amzn.com/0321434536

If you’re familiar with traditional vanity URLs, the concept should ring a bell. In many cases, the domain will be your only branding opportunity, so you want a link that contains or reminds people of your brand. Readers will see it in tweets, blog posts, wall comments, you name it, so your short URLs should provide something that both connects users to the original brand, and is short enough for them to re-use. For example, Flickr has set up http://flic.kr/, a shorter alias that still evokes the brand.

Tips: First, find a good, as-short-as-possible URL. Make use of the long list of new generic and country-specific top-level domains. A good starting point is iWantMyName.com. The site searches dozens of domain providers worldwide. (While .com is global, .es for example is controlled by Spain.) Costs vary from country to country, and almost all are in the sub-$300 range, with the majority being around $50. Get creative. Think initials, stock tickers, you name it. Leverage domain name suggestion tools like Domainr. Set up the software to create short URLS automatically (those auto-generated random-looking bits at the end like http://tr.im/zpBD). Make your own short URLs readily available on every page of your site. Get them out there, and they’ll be used. Every time they’re republished as the content spreads, your exposure grows.

2. Third-party short URLs can short-change your measurement efforts
The problem with attributing traffic from third-party short URLs is that most take away the referrer — the part of the request that tells your metric platform how the visitor got to your site. Depending on the vendor, you’ll see either the redirection service or where they clicked the short URL, but not both, providing an incomplete picture. While they may offer the ability for you to view several measurements on their own websites, you do not have access to raw incoming traffic information, and aggregating the data from the mass of vendors out there can prove to be a challenge. What does this all mean? You can’t tell where the bulk of your social organic traffic is coming from. For example, a report showing you top referring blogs is far more actionable than a report showing you the top short URL sites people used. The visitor paths — that piece of the web analytics puzzle that shows traffic sources and behavior — is too valuable to lose.

Tips: Consider implementing your own short URL feature on your site. This approach ensures you get that referrer information back. Once the feature is added, extend your analytics implementation to capture traffic on your short URLs. Although some third-party short URL providers share this data, you will have a more complete picture of user behavior on your site when you start tracking them at first contact (when they click the short URL), through to when they leave your site.

3. Keep your earned media
I doubt you have a service level agreement with a hundred different short URL providers. When the next one goes bust, there’s a strong chance its redirects will stop working entirely, and all of that earned media will evaporate. According to Carat, earned media assets are “consumer driven. They include all word of mouth communications, social media, viral, organic search, fan sites and shared content. To some extent, these communications are Earned through doing Bought and Owned well, but they reflect on the brand’s entire behavior.”

The recent news about tr.im, a service initially slated to disappear, has taken a happy turn, and it is giving the service to the community to maintain and develop. I’d like to think the service’s spirit was universal, but I doubt it. The service Cligs is currently dealing with similar business woes. Why find out how much of your traffic was coming through the next service to go bust?

Tips: Utilize your new branded short URLs in every social media channel. Make them so easy to use that it’d be more work to go elsewhere to generate them. Add an element to your site where users can copy a page’s short URL to their clipboards with one click. For product or campaign pages, try out vanity short URLs like http://molecu.lr/Analytics to increase recognition.

4. Do it yourself
The most straightforward way to reap the benefits and data from URL shortening is to set up such a service yourself. Technically, URL shortening is a low-hanging fruit; it will take an average lone developer about a week to get a basic service programmed from scratch. Simpler yet, there is a variety of off-the-shelf open-source applications that can get you up and running even quicker. Free applications like Yourls, Shorty, or lilurl can be set up in a couple of hours on your server. There are also software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors who can use your domain and give you, for a fee, a variety of statistics and logs. One example is budurl.com’s enterprise edition.

Tips: When setting up a URL shortening services yourself, there are several factors you will need to consider:

1. Think of your audience. Is it going to be used company-wide, by specific team members, or provided as a service to anyone on the web? Normally, smaller audiences will require a simpler and thus cheaper setup, while larger audiences may require multiple servers and continuous feature development. Workflow is another aspect you might wish to explore. Think of how often the tool will be used and whether there will be a need to provision its use and associated approval chains. Also, be aware that it is critical for URL shortening services to act as a springboard to the destination page, imposing minimal delay. Test how well the server performs on your expected load levels.
2. Create a bookmarklet. To simplify the creation of short URLs and increase the adoption of your service, the creation of a bookmarklet is recommended. Bookmarklets are browser bookmarks that will send the URL of the page currently being viewed in the browser and open a window and tab to your URL-shortening service. The page that will open will present you with the shortened URL. This way, a single click of a button can generate the shortened URL. You can also add a “Copy to Clipboard” widget on your pages (check out the lower left side: http://is.gd/4fPnx). Make it so easy to use your short URLs that it’d actually be more work to use a third-party provider.
3. Redirect broken links. One more elegant feature offered by some services that could be of special value to marketers is the ability to edit and monitor the content that you are linking to. If a page on your website is removed, you can point an existing shortened URL to a new version of the content or to an alternative page  . If the shortened URL points to an external site where the page is no longer available, you can detect that and react. Be sure to provide alternative content or present messaging to explain what happened. When you own your short URLs, you have a variety of ways to retain your earned media.

One organization that is already taking this approach is Coca-Cola, which set up a hosted short URL service called CokeURL.com. The service is at marketers’ disposal and gives them the ability to share content on or off Coca-Cola web assets using short URLs. The URLs can be short (CokeURL.com/s) or descriptive (CokeURL.com/fizzyVideo).

We hope the choice here is an easy one. Providing your own short URLs that tell readers your brand is awaiting them after the click increases your visibility. Implementing a short URL service on your own site increases your web analytics value and guards your earned media against third-party failure. Social media is a deep and fast moving channel, so keep your head up.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]

Just when you think you’ve got this whole brand experience thing figured out, along comes another form of social media that threatens to shake your grasp on the status quo. Over the past year, Twitter has taken the spanner-in-the-works title from Facebook, which took it from YouTube, which took it from Flickr, and so on. While it can seem daunting to consider managing your company’s image over so many forms of new media, this phenomenon can benefit your company — you have more opportunities than ever to generate positive brand experiences with your customers. Of course, this means there are more chances to make a mess of things as well. So how do you make sure you do more of the former and less of the latter?

1. Be generous
2. Drop the facade
3. Follow through

These principles may be easier for smaller companies to adopt, since they are often in more direct contact with their customers. But just as the web helped to level the playing field for small businesses trying to wrestle mindshare from their larger competitors, social media offers big firms the chance to reconnect with their customers more directly. Perhaps the most appropriate way to introduce the guidelines below is to sum them up in 140 characters or less. Let’s call it the Social Media Golden Rule: Use social media to engage with your customers as you have your vendors to engage with you.

First, be generous
Most of what we think of as social media began life outside the corporation. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, you name it – they all started as the pet project of small groups of individuals. Lacking corporate sponsorship, these sites relied on the support and contributions of online communities to evolve and to expand. This generosity remains part of the DNA of each of these tools to this day — they are referred to as consumer-generated media for a reason. To engage with these community-driven tools credibly, you must utilize their currency of free information and proper attribution.

While it may be appropriate to announce awards and accolades using social media channels, consider the value of that information to your potential and current customers. Does that announcement entertain, enlighten, or educate your viewers? Think of the difference between sharing the fact that your company won an award versus sharing freely the submission that won the award. To play on the old adage, share, don’t tell.

Self-promotion is a type of sharing, certainly, but it is by definition self-serving (or at least self-centered). The rapid growth of social media tools and sites is due to their ability to convey information with high potential for sharing. One of the best ways to raise your social media credibility, then, is to promote others instead of yourself (or your company). By acknowledging the contributions of others and by promoting their content, you engage in these media’s most definitive act: sharing. Doing so consistently and with relevance to your industry may increase both your credibility and your reach. Your company can become a trusted provider of useful and relevant content, regardless of its source.

The biggest downside to the proliferation of social media is the increasing sense of information overload. While it is to your advantage to share useful information, being an information curator provides an additional expert service to your customers. Any content your company generates will benefit from your reputation as a generous and knowledgeable member of the social media community. You won’t need to promote your company — others will do it for you.

Second, drop the facade
Being authentic does not mean simply representing your company accurately, it means stripping away the pretense. Nothing sets off BS detectors more than when companies use corporate lingo on the blog or via Twitter, or when they share only the most sanitized content on YouTube and Flickr. Press releases are not blog entries. Being authentic means being candid and being real.

You don’t have to air your company’s dirty laundry, but openness and transparency are inherent to the appeal of all social media. Whether they are prospective customers or employees, folks interested in learning more about your company and its corporate culture will look to see how you present yourself via these channels. They can sniff your pretense a mile away — and they won’t like it.

By participating in these media more as a member of the community and less as a corporation, you will be seen as a valued contributor to the culture around each of these tools. The bad news is that letting down your corporate guard is only the first step, if a crucial one. Interacting with your customers on their terms gets you into the game. They will appreciate your effort, but will not forget what you represent: your brand.

Lastly, follow through
Though these media may force you to engage with your customers on their terms, it does not change the fundamental nature of the relationship: They are your customers (or at least potentially so). As such, they will expect you to address their questions (or complaints) with the same attention as you would via more traditional customer service channels. These expectations may seem contradictory or even unfair in light of social media’s more informal atmosphere, but your willingness to accept these terms of engagement can set you apart from other brands.

Twitter may epitomize these competing expectations best, with its simultaneous drive for brevity and immediacy. Customers you please may or may not praise your efforts to their followers, but those you don’t will state their displeasure swiftly and bluntly. Whether broadcast as complaints on your Facebook fan page, or as 140-character open letters, your responses must reflect the same responsiveness and professionalism you would show a customer who has waited too long on hold for customer service. Servicing customer needs in such public forums may not be comfortable, but well-handled resolutions will demonstrate — and broadcast — your commitment to customer service more authentically than any slogan or tag line.

Those of you advocating on behalf of a more formal brand may need to shift your tone of voice when utilizing these media, but you cannot afford to make the mistake of thinking professional customer service etiquette does not apply. Edgy and more casual brands will likely find social media to be familiar ground, but may miss the opportunity to enhance their perceived accountability.

Conclusion
Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube encourage candid dialog and responsive interactions. Most people appreciate those qualities in any relationship — not just the one they have with their vendors of choice. When combined with a willingness to be accountable, these elements provide the raw material your company can use to create positive brand experiences.

The barrier for entry to participate with these media is so low that it is tempting to just jump in and figure it out along the way. Some folks may advise you that since these media cost nothing, you have nothing to lose. That perspective forgets the possibility of a company damaging its brand reputation. So while it is untrue that engagement with social media has only upside, it is true that these tools offer potentially huge returns on your investment. Keep the three principles outlined in this article in mind as you craft your social media marketing strategy, but if in doubt, remember the Golden Rule: Engage with your customers as you would have your vendors engage with you.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]