When times are tough, companies tighten the belt buckle (thank you, Captain Obvious). This generally entails companies cutting or severely limiting their expenditures on non-essential projects to free up money for important things…like executive bonuses (ZING!). While businesses are cutting down expenditures across the board, many proactive companies are making concentrated efforts to grow and enhance their digital presence.

Before I write any further, let me address my somewhat biased opinion on the matter. Yes, I am the New Business & Marketing Manager of a firm that sells clients digital services and that would serve to reduce my impartiality. With that said, I am merely pointing out what others have chosen to do with their limited budgets. I just happen to think that they are right.

A great first example is the recent launch by The New York Times of its TimesReader 2.0 . Here is an industry that is, by all accounts, dying. It seems that every month there is news of yet another prominent newspaper going bankrupt, and while the Times will no doubt survive this print holocaust, it has not been immune to the pitfalls that plague its industry contemporaries (see Reuters' article "S&P cuts New York Times rating deeper into junk status" ). Realizing that in order to survive and remain an industry-leader, the Times has chosen to invest in developing the first truly "digital newspaper".

Competitive advantages are all the more important in today's tough marketplace. One of the best advantages a business can leverage in a recession is customer service which, when executed correctly, builds consumer loyalty and can distinguish a business from its competitors. The web provides businesses the opportunity to interact and engage customers in an expedited and convenient manner, provided that they embrace emerging technologies and digital trends (note to cellular companies, your online chats are even more infuriating than your 800 lines). Domino's Pizza recently committed to improving dialogue with consumers by hiring a consulting agency to assist them in strengthening their relationships with consumers through online communities. As stated in their press release, Domino's seeks to "continue to incorporate social media into their overall communications plan, expand consumer trust, and build excitement in new services and products."

But investing in digital doesn't have to mean investing large amounts of capital. For example, take what some small businesses are doing with the free service Twitter . New Orleans based Naked Pizza, recently launched a Twitter-specific marketing campaign that proved to be rather successful. In a test run April 23, an exclusive-to-Twitter promotion brought in 15% of the day's business. And while Twitter has yet to offer a comprehensive analytics tool, the simple daily tracking of how many users you are attracting shows at a macro-level how your outreach via the service is fairing.

Does bolstering your digital presence make your company "recession-proof"…probably not. It isn't a cure-all and it can certainly require some investment when funding is tight. However, going digital (as it pertains to your specific industry and audience) arms your company with a proven means of communication in a time when traditional methods are proving ineffective.

Or you can always think of it like this: In this economy, it couldn't hurt to try.

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.

One Year Down...

Today, Killswitch is celebrating the 1-year birthday of our blog Perspectives! Since its introduction, Perspectives has been our outlet for giving back to the communities we rely on. It has been a lot of fun sharing our thoughts and ideas with you, so be assured that we will continue delivering hot, fresh content on a weekly basis.

Over the last twelve months I have been asked a few times:

Why go to so much trouble to blog? Aren't you just giving away your trade secrets?

It's true that Perspectives is no money maker — obviously no one is paying to read these articles, and we certainly wouldn't want them to! So why do we continue to ask our entire staff at Killswitch to spend valuable man-hours writing?

And Many More

As I mentioned before, a big part of it is the importance of giving back to the communities that support our business. From a development standpoint, we solely use Open Source coding languages, libraries and programs, which means that these tools have been provided free of charge. In stark contrast to Microsoft tools like .NET which are supported internally and leased to developers, Open Source code is maintained by a community of volunteers who are concerned enough about the success of the industry to pitch in and help.

Every time I run into a bug while developing a Web app, my first inclination is to Google my issue and see if someone has already written a blog article with a fitting solution — and often times that works! Maintaining Perspectives with helpful tutorials and free downloadable code is our way of saying 'thank you' to the community and giving something back.

Keep It Coming

Perspectives is a place where we can show you a more candid, honest look at the people who make The Killswitch Collective what it is. This is our opportunity to express our passion for intuitive design, clever development and fruitful business relationships. We want to show our readers how we think, how we work through problems and how we strive to make the Web a better place.

With one year under our belts, we're just starting to get warmed up. Keep checking back each week for more articles about development, design and anything else we're thinking about. If you are new to Perspectives, here are a few tips to help get you started:

• Subscribe to Perspectives by adding this URL to your RSS reader: http://feeds.feedburner.com/killswitchcollective/perspectives. Not using an RSS reader yet? Try Google Reader!
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