HOW TO: Survive a Social Media Revolt

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow him on Twitter

It often stuns me to see how poor social media entrepreneurs and their executives are at listening to their communities, communicating with them, and generally using the communities’ feedback to improve their services. A quick glance at the top three sites in three of the fastest growing sectors within social media will exemplify this point.

There have been numerous ‘revolts’ on Digg (social news), hundreds of thousands of users have created numerous groups to stage protests on Facebook (social networking), and hundreds of blog posts have been written about how terrible Twitter’s service and up-time used to be and what a poor job they were doing in communicating their problems with even their most loyal users (microblogging).

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The Hulu Crisis

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Keeping that in mind, it came as no surprise that when FX requested that Hulu remove an earlier season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia from the site, Hulu complied and removed the seasons in question without communicating the change to any community members. Seeing as “Sunny” is one of the most popular shows on the site, the community was rightfully upset and in quite an uproar at Hulu’s mismanagement of the situation.

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