Month: February 2007 Page 1 of 2

Last week, I told you about a funny video about an early Help Desk that had shown up on YouTube, then disappeared.

Well, it appears that the video with the English subtitles is back up. You can see it here.

But there’s more to this story, thanks to Adam Angst, who publishs the popular TidBITS newsletter for Mac fans. He was the one that pointed me to the video in the first place.

In the most recent TidBITS newsletter, he has a post about how the whole thing came about. I’m going to include the full text of his note here, because I’m not sure how to send you to the posting directly.

It’s an interesting story, and it illustrates how important it is for companies to be aware of what can happen to their content, even years after it’s produced. It’s all part of the Long Tail effect, which can be a real benefit for content providers.

But if you’re not prepared for it, you can also get bogged down in legal mumbo-jumbo that won’t do anyone any good.

Here’s Adam’s post:

Early Help Desk Video Gone and Back Again

by Adam C. Engst

The day after I wrote it up in TidBITS (see “Early Help Desk Video,” 2007-02-19), ZrednaZ, the user who posted the Early Help Desk Video with English subtitles removed the video, generating a flurry of squawks from TidBITS readers who wanted to see it. Some additional searching on YouTube turned up a handful of identical videos, all with Danish but not English subtitles. Then I noticed that one of the people leaving comments had found another copy with English subtitles, and shortly afterwards, ZrednaZ reposted the video, with a few additional seconds at the end (unfortunately, the reposted video is much darker than the other copies, though it has better subtitles).

Here’s what happened. The original video aired in 2001 on a show called “Oystein og meg” (“Oystein & I”) from the Norwegian television network, NRK, but it seems to have shown up on YouTube only recently. Another YouTube user recently posted a short clip from NRK News (with English subtitles added) that discusses the situation. It turns out that the version uploaded to YouTube became one of the most viewed videos on YouTube, generating about a million views. The news report goes on to say that it’s illegal to upload NRK content and that NRK’s lawyers are now investigating the case. Upon hearing about the NRK lawyers, ZrednaZ got cold feet and pulled the video from YouTube, but after numerous requests and seeing the many other copies elsewhere on YouTube, reposted it.

It will be instructive to see how NRK’s lawyers react. Yes, the reposts on YouTube were done without permission. But it’s unclear who, if anyone, has been harmed. The work was done 6 years ago, and presumably entertained many Norwegians at the time, but my bet is that it has essentially been ignored ever since, neither making money for NRK nor advancing the careers of the creators. Now, thanks to YouTube and the viral nature of humor on the Internet, it’s at least bringing the creators some attention. One of them is quoted as saying, “This is probably the closest we are getting to a world wide launch, and we are very pleased so far.” The fact that NRK wasn’t prepared to turn that attention into revenue or something constructive is a missed opportunity, but not a reason to employ heavy-handed legal tactics. The lesson is that you never know when or where lightning will strike, but if you can be ready for it or move sufficiently quickly, you just may be able to animate your very own Frankenstein with all that power.

Although I was a touch worried, I don’t think we were responsible for the video coming to the attention of the NRK’s lawyers. I heard about the video clip on 13-Feb-07 from a friend whose librarian sister-in-law sent it to her, and I posted the story to ExtraBITS on that day. The video had been making the rounds in the librarian community, apparently, and on 14-Feb-07 there was a post on The Chicago Blog about it. I suspect that many of the YouTube views came before my piece ran in TidBITS, given that the NRK News story about the situation apparently aired on 19-Feb-07, the same day as that TidBITS issue went out.

This is kind of cool. Todd Maffin, who does the offical CBC blog, is having a session here at Northern Voice, where he’s letting the geeks attending tell the CBC what the new CBC website should look like.

Todd is recording what people think would be good to see on the site. Then he’s going to post the recording on the blog, as well as passing it along to senior folks at the CBC, who will be paying attention.

It’s an interesting use of all this talent that’s in this room.

The recording should be up on Inside the CBC later this afternoon.

A few weeks ago, I linked to a great video, which featured a 5-minute tour of the history of Web-based communications.

It’s fascinating to watch and very well done.

So I was intrigued to find this interview with Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and the man who put that video together.

The interview is posted here on John Battelle’s Searchblog. Wesch has also agreed to answer questions through the Comments area on Searchblog.

If you like stories that dig into a topic, rather than just skimming the surface, you’ll enjoy reading this.

Clearly, I’m not the only one who is hoping to start a bandwagon about the need (and the good business sense) for keeping customers satisfied.

Kathy Sierra, who writes the blog “Creating Passionate Users” has a wonderful post called “What tail is wagging the “user happiness” dog?“

She’s writing about the problems that arise when the needs of the company overrule the needs of the customer.

You can’t swing a poodle in business without hitting a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario, where some process, policy, procedure, or program controls user happiness. Where we become slaves to the needs and demands of the IT department, efficiency, accounting, PR, legal, marketing, next-quarter’s results, Upper Management, etc.

She’s got a great idea for anyone who needs to keep things in perspective. Just put a picture of a dog up on the wall, to keep everyone thinking about who’s tail is doing the wagging.

Kathy also points to a really well-written post by Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software in New York.

He writes about his small company’s methods for making sure that they respond to the needs of their customers and how much they’ve benefitted by doing so. It’s a great story and one that I recommend highly.

As a bootstrapped software company, Fog Creek couldn’t afford to hire customer service people for the first couple of years, so Michael and I did it ourselves. The time we spent helping customers took away from improving our software, but we learned a lot and now we have a much better customer service operation.

Here are seven things we learned about providing remarkable customer service. I’m using the word remarkable literally—the goal is to provide customer service so good that people remark.

The seven items he lists are:

1. Fix everything two ways

2. Suggest blowing out the dust

3. Make customers into fans

4. Take the blame

5. Memorize awkward phrases

6. Practice puppetry

7. Greed will get you nowhere

Of course, he’s got a lot more detail and some great stories behind those seven points. But I’m sure that if more companies thought along the same lines and truly put the needs of their customers’ first, the benefits for everyone would be astounding.

It’s a simple idea – and perhaps that’s the problem. We’ve allowed our companies to become so complex that we can’t believe that so many problems can be alleviated by making sure that we practice good manners and be polite to people. It just seems so obvious we can’t believe it could work.

Sad but true, apparently, as Air Canada exhibits so regularly.

Customer service (or the lack of it) has been a hot topic in our family for awhile.

This past summer, we had a run-in with Air Canada, when my nephew’s hockey equipment went missing on it’s way to Toronto from Norway. It’s a long, sad story that I’ve heard way too often recently.

It’s always frustrating when the service levels you get are way, way below what they should be. Air Canada always springs to mind when I think of bad customer service, despite their fancy TV ads.

So I was intrigued by this recent post from Seth Godin. (It’s actually been around awhile, but I’m still catching up on my reading.)

He introduces us to his latest creation — sheepwalking:

I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line.

You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking.

The TSA ‘screener’ who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A ‘customer service’ rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars of TV time even though she knows it’s not working–she does it because her boss told her to.

It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff.

We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish.

His argument strikes a chord with me. Especially his summing up:

Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themself in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

The biggest step, though, comes from anyone who teaches or hires. And that’s to embrace non-sheep behavior, to reward it and cherish it. As we’ve seen just about everywhere there’s been growth lately, that’s where the good stuff happens.

You should read the whole post.

I’m off to a blogger’s conference this weekend in Vancouver, called Northern Voice. I’m very excited about it, because I know that I’m going to meet a lot of passionate people. Passion is critical for bloggers and podcasters. This isn’t just a job. It’s got to be something we care about.

I care about this blog, even if there are times when I fall behind on the “daily” part of it. But I’ve been blogging for nearly three years now and it’s become something that’s pretty important for me.

We need to put passion back into our workplaces. It’s important. I think I’ll add it to my mission statement right now.