They may come from defining challenges you personally have when dealing with other vendors; some should address the approach you’d like them to take with online public relations.  Others just make sense from a "best practices" point of view.  Make the list specific to your situation.

Whatever’s on your list, refer to it daily and make changes as appropriate.

These examples are a good starting point for you to develop with your team. Adopting any of these can only improve your relationship with your vendors and make your online campaigns more successful.

1. Provide intelligent and aggressive options for our social media PR campaign on a quarterly basis.

2. Set pre-defined goals and metrics by which the social media PR campaign’s success or failure can be easily measured.

3. Offer several online and offline options with the best chance of success.  (We are entitled to use whatever PR methods we feel are best for our campaign and should never be pressured into using social media PR channels that don’t make sense to us.)

4. Deliver prompt responses to our questions.

5. Provide status updates about the campaign on a bi-weekly basis.

6. Keep us informed of the status of the social media landscape and changes in the primary social media platforms as it relates to our campaign strategy.

7. Give us access to analytics and reports used to measure the results of our social media campaign.

8. Return telephone calls and emails on the same day.

9. Remain transparent to us. Keeping us informed about what they are doing and why they are taking one approach over another is critical to our learning.

10. Give us access to knowledge and experience with a training package to teach us their tactics and strategies as we work together to create and execute a successful social media campaign.

Have any to add? I'd love to hear your “10 Commandments” for Social Media client relations.