What you should expect from a good partner is less of “Yes, I can do it for that price” and more of “OK, this sounds great, now here’s what we need to think about for this to be successful and here’s where we can take it a step further.”

The partner you chose, you hopefully chose because they have experience in the area you’re looking to occupy. They should make it easier for you to think about details you may not have thought about yet in the course of planning.

It’s another vote for the “don’t reinvent the wheel” idea. Partner with someone who has already been through the riggers of building from the ground up.

Of course every project will have it’s unique details, some of which can’t be foreseen by the most experienced of partners, but in large part the misery of a bad post-mortem on a project can be parlayed into a happy hour celebration by finding the right partner.

I think a huge caveat needs to be thrown out there though: managing partnership expectations.

The open source community works so well because everyone has the same expectation: to put out a great product and not care about profit or commercialization. I’ve seen too many post-mortems that end in “ok, well next time we just need to communicate more effectively up front…” This, of course, means there is no next time.

On the other hand, waiting for details to be ironed out can delay – or, more often than not, kill a project. Though, I suppose that finding that right partner and getting through the first project effectively leads to significantly quicker executions moving forward.

And now you have my brain, dumped out on your blog.

Thanks for commenting Jeff.

When it comes to larger companies, I guess the difficult part comes with finding someone you trust to man the helm of your corporate social media initiative. A position which formerly was handed over to interns and recent college grads really needs someone who’s a rational thinker, a pr agent, a problem solver, a people person and a true brand advocate. Maybe that’s not so easy to find in these times of rapid job turn over. It should really be considered one of the most important corporate positions on the “new hire” list.

Earlier this year an Amazon employee made a data mistake which affected 57,000 items on their website. These items were misclassified and customers were making a lot of noise about it. At first, Amazon called the problem a “glitch,” but later publicly admitted their mistake.

My feeling is that for an individual, a company or a brand, “honesty” is the best policy. After all, we’re only human!

“There are no failures, just experiences and your reactions to them.” – Tom Krause

Cheers,
Laura Savard
Brand Expressionist®
Laura Savard´s last blog ..Subtractive Thinking

Dealing with those out to just to see you fall on your face is as simple (or complicated) as this.

Take the high road.

Do what you can to make the situation right. If it comes down to a place where even your best efforts won’t turn the other party into a advocate, at least you have a public record of trying to correct the situation. Again the key is keeping the conversation public. A majority of the audience will most likely see the other party is unreasonable and stick up for you.

Just like Apple fans did to rebuke the Droid commercials:

iDon’t Care

You touch on this, briefly…but Andrew Bird (who I will now be checking out) was in front of his fans. A social media strategy puts you in front of EVERYONE. You make a mistake and the people looking to jump on that mistake are right there.

So while – I agree – it’s certainly important that you don’t bullshit through a social media strategy, there are a ton of people out there who simply want to point out your wrongdoings, deliberate or not.

Just sayin.

the more i think about it, two things keep coming to mind.

of all mediums, perhaps social media is the most agnostic when it comes to rules of dispersing knowledge & information. after all, social media is really about establishing relationships and being genuine, if you believe your audience will tolerate a higher concentration because they know you’re selling something, then maybe you should go for it.

at this point we’re classifying content into 4 categories (tops), how long until there are more classifications? what will they be? how will the medium evolve? will video tweets help or hurt?