Hulu recently made a mistake in how it removed content from its site, and its community turned on the company rather quickly. Of course they tried to fix the mistake, but some damage was already done.

Muhammad Saleem goes over some things that they could have done that would have stopped this whole mess from hurting their brand.

My favourite section, also the first tip from Muhammad is:

Communicate Even If You Have Nothing to Say
It baffles me to see that most of the people running popular social media sites (and new media sites in general) hardly communicate with their communities. When they do, it’s usually for one of two reasons, either an announcement of new features (which is useful for PR purposes), or to apologize for their mistakes (these apologies usually come after massive uproar, not in the absence of). Write to your community and participate in your community even if you don’t have something ground breaking to say, and definitely communicate with your community if you’re going to be making changes that will effect thousands of loyal users.

Read the other four lessons over on Mashable.