Disney’s reputation for legendary guest service is driven by seven simple guidelines. Cast Members (that’s Disney-speak for employees) internalize the guidelines by associating each with one of the seven dwarfs. It might be an interesting exercise to make similar associations for services on the social web.

Be Happy… Show some personality in your online interactions. Be careful not to come off like an adbot for your marketing department or output from a re-tweeting script.

Be like Sneezy… Get viral to make your posts contagious. People need to be sharing your message across channels and off-line.

Don’t be Bashful… Seek out your customers and jump into conversations about your brand, especially if you’ve create space to do so like a Facebook Fan page.

Be like Doc… Use all of the tools at your disposal for immediate service recovery, from major crisis communication all the way down to individual consumer complaints.

Don’t be Grumpy… Don’t get quickly discouraged if you’re having trouble translating your efforts into ROI. If your strategy (you do have one, right?) aligns with your company’s overall communication goals, you’ll come out ahead.

Be like Sleepy… Carrying out the tactics that support your strategy is going to require non-trivial effort. Be prepared to put in the long hours and dedicate appropriate resources. Grab some coffee and get to it.

Don’t be Dopey… Become the smart guy in your niche. You want to be the one people look to for expertise.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Disney and they do not endorse this post. The contents of this post are based on the idea of linking basic guidelines to the seven dwarfs. The guidelines I’ve written are far less magical than Disney’s real ones.

Companies looking to turn tweets into dollars can take a lesson from Bengals wideout Chad Ochocinco. Although his recent tweets during an NFL preseason game amounted to $25k in league fines, #85 gets Twitter. Ochocinco is a brand at the end of the day, and consumers want to engage with brands in real time.

There’s a reason players and coaches give sideline interviews during network broadcasts. Fans want more information while there’s still time on the clock. Voluntary tweets are a lot more interesting than boring sound bites from shoving a mic in a player’s face. The NFL has made brilliant marketing maneuvers over the years to become one of America’s most powerful brands, but they are being shortsighted with the anti-tweeting policy.

When Apple unveiled iPhone 4 at the Worldwide Developers Conference, I wasn’t waiting for the next morning’s newspaper to get the details. Pre-conference teasers, live updates, and chatter on social networks connected me to the event as it unfolded. Information is a company’s most valuable resource, and sharing it with consumers at the right time can pay off big.

Businesses using Twitter to expand brand interaction would be really foolish to ban tweeting in the workplace. A dynamic and flexible policy will fit most companies better than cutting all access. Shutting out an emerging communication tool for fear of lost productivity, bad publicity, and legal issues is reminiscent of e-mail in the 90s. Get with it, already.

This concept can be easily observed as such companies usually fail miserably while trying to discover their inner Zappos. I’m defining an anti-social company as one that doesn’t include customer service as a serious component of its value proposition. A company that didn’t engage customers in 2004 probably isn’t going to be the social media poster child of 2010. These companies fail for reasons that are analogous to an anti-social person at a party.

They don’t spend much time getting ready. They’d rather blend in than stand out. They don’t really know who else is going to be there and don’t know what they want to get out of it.

Companies aren’t doing proper due diligence before implementing a social media strategy. Researching, setting measurable goals, finding customers, developing relationships, and integrating the overall business strategy are essential prerequisites.

They show up late. The ones that show up early have to help set up and that can be a lot of work. The whole thing might be a bust, so sitting back until everyone else is there seems safer.

Early adopters aren’t the only ones that succeed in social spaces, but stragglers can be pathetic when they show up just because everyone else is doing it. It’s better to show up before the channel peaks.

They don’t bring anything. It’s easier and cheaper to mooch off of what’s already there. Besides, others might not like what they bring. If they do bring something, it’s usually self-serving.

Companies are imitating everyone else’s ideas instead of doing something novel.

They stay in their comfort zone. If things are clicking with this small group in the corner, there’s no reason to branch out.

Once these companies find a bubble in the social media universe where they can do something, they stay put and don’t take any risks. They don’t maximize all of the available channels.

They don’t mingle. People might not like what they have to say, and it could even get them in trouble. They don’t really know how to start a conversation.

Companies are observing and listening but not participating or taking action. They’re not building relationships. When they do participate, they only talk about themselves. They come off as inauthentic and awkward.

These failures can be traced to corporate cultures that are incompatible with new media. The exceptions, companies that don’t fit the mold of a social company but execute a successful social strategy, are successful because of major cultural shifts (see Comcast). Think of a company that lacks innovation, suffers from managerial hubris, or neglects customer service. Did you think of Wal-mart? Sprint? Bank of America? AOL? They have all been involved in social media, but how well are they doing and how painful was it to get there?

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” This old proverb reminds consumers to protest loudly when they are wronged and signals companies to work harder at soliciting complaints from the less obnoxious subset of customers. And as wheels evolved from oxcarts to automobiles, so too has the proverbial squeaky wheel changed with the advent of social media.

The proliferation of sites like Facebook and Twitter has created new audiences for commercial grievances. I should know since a quick scroll through my recent tweets includes 140-character-or-fewer outbursts toward Orkin Pest Control, DirecTV, and Best Buy. I never received any responses from these mini rants, but sometimes it just feels good to share consumer strife with my 53 followers.

I feel like firms cannot and probably should not aspire to respond to every disgruntled tweep since grease is a scarce resource. This realization got me thinking about how and when companies do respond and the fairness of prevailing approaches.

The wheel with more spokes is far more likely to get a dollop of that service recovery grease. That is, the size and composition of the tweep’s network seem important. My followers aren’t likely to generate negative buzz of any noticeable magnitude even when my complaints are valid. Now take a peek at Ashton Kutcher’s (@aplusk) followers. He is the wheel with 40-inch chrome spinners in the Twitter universe. Kutcher’s 5.5 million+ followers, presumably made up of 20- and 30-somethings, would catch a company’s attention if they started spreading negative buzz.

Of course, followers have to read and retweet the message for it to have any impact, so us non-actor types can start by making our complaints novel and interesting. Saying “United Airlines sucks >:( !!!!” on Twitter is not going to be as effective as writing a catchy song about the bad experience and posting it on YouTube (United Breaks Guitars, 9 million+ views). Oh, we’re not musically inclined either? Then we’ll probably get better results by writing a letter to the corporate office like they did back in the days of the oxcart.