There is a universal rule that people, companies and organizations must adhere to when participating in the Social Media Realm: Remain Transparent!

All too often, those trying to maximize the all-too-appealing benefits of conducting social campaigns forget the transparency tenet. Truthfully, I understand the temptation, especially for marketers, advertisers and PR professionals. People tend to respond more favorably to communications that they believe are altruistic or sincere, communications that do not possess ulterior motives.

But transparency goes both ways and applies, if not even more so, to those who maintain and run these sites. Again, I understand the temptation. These sites are cash cows (Facebook's total implied value is around $15 billion). While just about every industry and company is struggling in these financial times, the social media companies that run sites like Facebook and Hulu continue to add more users each month, which in turn means larger advertising premiums. However, the decision makers of these sites must be wary that the monetization of the communities they've created doesn't mitigate the user's trust.

Case in point, let's look at what Hulu recently did to assuage user rage over the removal of a popular TV show on the site. Hulu, at the request of the content provider, FX Network, removed "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" from the site's downloads, and it did so without any form of notification to its users. "Sunny" was one of the most popular shows on Hulu and its many fans began emailing, posting and tweeting away in protest. Below is the letter posted by Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, to the site's users.

On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu's opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we've added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well.

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these "Sunny" episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I'd like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case - FX Networks - was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009. Unfortunately we do not have the permission to keep the specific episodes up on Hulu beyond that. We hope that the additional two weeks of availability will help to address some of the frustration that was felt over the past few days.

The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it's not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.

Sincerely,

Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu

This is a textbook example of how to diffuse a social uprising. Kilar directly addressed Hulu's users, accepted blame for the way the situation was handled, offered a remedy and then promised to learn from this mistake (I may just disseminate this letter to politicians).

Think about this example when your company or organization decides to go Social. Remember that the user is wary and easily slighted. Remain transparent and reap the rewards!

Thanks to Muhammad Saleem (@msaleem on Twitter) for writing a great article on this subject.