Recently, while on a trip, I purchased a really cool pair of shoes.

Tragically, however, after but a day of breaking in my new beauties, one of them suffered irreparable damage. Given the business in which I work, my immediate reaction was to proceed with a little stalking to find a customer service solution to my heartache and shoelessness. I quickly found the manufacturer of my now-broken footwear on Twitter in order to ask them if they could help me out with the situation at hand.

After three days of waiting patiently for a response, I was directed that the best way to have my concerns addressed was via sending a message to their account on MySpace. From a consumer perspective, this felt like the equivalent of being on the phone with your cable company and having them ask you to hang up and call a separate number – no jumping the queue, no transfer, no anything.

It’s great that companies are taking the leap into testing the social media waters using a variety of different platforms – but the customer experience across all selected platforms, in a successful social media strategy, must be consistent. By creating redundant barriers to customer service and interaction, the overall customer experience with a brand can become negative – which defeats the objective of starting to play in this emerging landscape.

So what do you do to keep it consistent? Do you limit the channels in which you interact? Do you share strategies between those responsible for various response venues? What’s your ideal approach?