I’ve had several occasions recently to evaluate video upload/player options for clients, and as a result, I am recommending that, budget permitting, they stay away from YouTube, Vimeo and other “free” services due to what I believe is an unnecessary risk to reputation.

Every free video service, and even some of the paid video distribution networks, have what I call “drag.” They pull along a little red wagon full of undesirable content behind them. Positioned alongside this often questionable content, your message could end up sending a viewer to a competitor, or worse still, cause them to be offended.

This tag-along content comes in several forms.

Advertising

Many video upload/viewing sites present advertising messages alongside videos. Revver for example presents subtle Google Ads or banners, such as an ad for Verizon, at the top of the page. I did a search on “women entrepreneurs” and above and alongside serious business videos I was presented with ads for a wacky Martin Lawrence movie, jewelry, and a banner ad promoting a medication for bipolar disorder.

Ads on some sites are extremely inappropriate, offering Viagra and Cialis, or dating services, adding an undesirable sleaze factor to the viewing experience. Perhaps worse is the prospect, quite real, of a viewer being hijacked by an ad for a competitive product or service.

This is not true of all sites. YouTube and Vimeo do not seem to have this problem. I can’t say unequivocally whether this is universal for these sites, but I did not see advertising, other than promotions for other videos, while I was browsing these sites.

Related Videos

Another area of risk is in “related” videos offered by many services that by virtue of a few keywords become informally linked to yours. YouTube, for example, offers a scrolling list of related videos. This offers a multitude of ways for your message to be diluted or connected with something you’d prefer not to have your company associated with.

Delta Airlines ran a contest and identified a real employee to record a safety video, which the company then posted on YouTube. The campaign was a big success, gaining national media attention, and the video has close to one million views (more I would argue than live flight attendants have received in the history of aviation.)

If you visit the YouTube page displaying the video (you get there either by going to YouTube, searching “Delta Flight Safety,” and playing the video, or by seeing the video somewhere else and clicking on the embedded player,) you’ll see YouTube’s list of related videos, which includes one from a disgruntled passenger titled Delta Flight 6499, SEVEN HOURS on the tarmac. Does Delta really want to drive viewers to this?

Comments

Video upload sites that offer viewers the opportunity to comment also pose risks. This is really a problem on YouTube, where it seems there are thousands of people with nothing better to do than leave comments like “this video sucks” and “fail!” Maybe your video IS bad, but a hundred comments confirming this fact don’t help.

There are other ways to upload and play video without exposing your company’s message to these kinds of scenarios. I don’t claim to know everything about either all free video services or paid services, but I do know there are alternatives.

A lot of companies are using Brightcove for example, where you pay by the month based on number of streams viewed. You can “skin” the player with your logo and company colors. It is embeddable, so it can be inserted into a company blog post, social media newsroom page, or on a third-party blog just like a YouTube video. The difference is, you’re now driving traffic to YOUR site instead of YouTube. Sure, more people are visiting YouTube, so if large numbers of views is your goal, I recommend BOTH approaches. Do you own branded embed on your company sites and then upload the same video to YouTube. Brightcove also manages hosting, so you don’t have to worry that demand spikes and bandwidth will be a problem.

There are a number of similar offerings to Brightcove, such as Permission TV, Maven Networks, KIT Digital, The FeedRoom, and VMIX, Twistage, and Move Networks. I have singled out Brightcove not because it is the best of these (though it may be), but because I am familiar with it.

Many of the services I’ve listed above, and many others, also offer streaming video, and this is generally done with an embeddable player, so most of the same concerns apply.

So if you want to upload video as part of your communications strategy, remember you have many options, and things might not be as simple as they seem. Make sure that your company’s message isn’t tarnished by being presented in the wrong context.

Tags: Brightcove, Vimeo, YouTube, Permission TV, Maven Networks, KIT Digital, The FeedRoom, VMIX, Twistage, Move Networks, embeddable video player, enterprise

In the past week I have become aware of a number of, how do I describe them, unusual Web 2.0 services/sites.

The first is ZobZee, an amazing new service that skips APIs, keyboards, SMS, RSS, and even the USPS to allow users to directly connect their sizable intellects with their social networks.

This evening, the irrepressible Stephen Streight pointed me to two more entries in the race to be the ultimate Web 2.0 destination, The dullest blog in the world, and Zombo, where “everything is possible.”

I hope you’ll take a look at these revolutionary new entries into the world of Web 2.0 innovation. It’s good to know that the “industry,” or whatever the heck we are, has a sense of humor because many of us take ourselves WAY too seriously.

Update: Morton Fox let me know about the mother of all aggregators, FriendFeedFeed.

If you know of other sites/services with a similar value proposition, please add leave a comment and add them below.

Tags: Zombo, ZobZee, dullest blog in the world

This is the tale of two corporate spokespeople who committed online ethical gaffes. Neither of these stories is breaking news, but together, they represent an interesting contrast between two markedly different ends of the social media ethics spectrum.

The story of Little Weasel is one of anonymous blog commenting run amok. On January 29, a popular Irish blogger, Sabrina Dent, blogged about her experiences with Moli, a Dublin-based start-up that Dent described as “social networking for grownups.” She writes that she was impressed by the service which emphasizes its privacy controls in its marketing. She says upon sign-up that Moli “broke her heart.”

“For all the positioning and talk of ‘protecting your privacy’ MOLI fails at the most basic hurdle. Because it doesn’t cloak new joins; in fact, it has to be displaying them somewhere, because within 15 minutes of joining, the spam started.”

Here’s where the fun begins. A visitor to the blog, Hawk5721 (hereafter known as Little Weasel) left a comment in support of Moli “MOLI is awesome. Exactly what grown ups and business have been waiting for.”

A little snooping by readers of the blog revealed Little Weasel’s comment came from inside Moli. When confronted on the blog about his identity, Little Weasel left this obtuse comment “As far as where i work of course i want to stick up for the company that is going to change the market place.”

At that point, commenters let loose with vicious character attacks, obscenities and name calling. Obviously, Little Weasel had received some counsel, as he decided eventually to reveal that he was actually Moli’s Director of Customer Service, in a no longer anonymous comment:

“Please accept my apologies for using my personal alias when commenting to you about some mis-information I believe you blogged about the company. It was my responsibility to include my company name and title. In the future, I will include my name and title in all posts about company information.

In my capacity as Director of Customer Service, I simply wanted to address, in an informal way, some of the issues that you raised which are well intentioned but do not accurately reflect how privacy works on MOLI.

My email is ddifiore@moli.com and I would be happy to address any additional questions that you may have.”

Obviously too little too late. Five months later in fact, Little Weasel continues to receive blogosphere beatings for his gaffe. In fact, we discussed this case study last week at a PRSA panel in Mountain View.

His behavior was inexcusable, but so was Dent’s and that of the visitors to her blog. I will not reproduce here the foul language and names used to describe Little Weasel, but they would shock all but the coarsest of us. In their own way, all of the people who attacked Little Weasel are guilty of a similar ethical violation: using the relative anonymity of the blogosphere to behave in an incredibly uncivil way. If you were to unleash this kind of vitriol in a business meeting, you would find yourself on the street in ten minutes.

As to the original issue, a couple of things are clear. Little Weasel should have known better. He made a gross error in judgment. He was deceptive. He broke a cardinal principal of social media ethics and when confronted, he dug in and continued the deception.

Little Weasel was not guilty of astroturfing, as Dent asserts. Astroturfing is not a single act of misrepresentation in a blog comment. It is a bogus grassroots campaign, an organized, broad based effort at deception, and there is no evidence that Moli embarked on any such thing. This was a single albeit incredibly stupid act by one ill informed person.

Little Weasel did apologize, a bit late in the game, but the merciless beating on the blog and elsewhere continued. This is because, for some, our friend Daniel stopped being a person and became a case study and a stand-in for all companies that don’t “get” social media, privacy, authenticity, etc.

What else can Moli do at this point? They need to do a little internal social media training. They need to keep Little Weasel off of the blogs for a bit. They need to ask themselves how their positioning as a company concerned with privacy affects how they need to conduct themselves in the blogosphere.

Personally, I think Little Weasel has learned his lesson, and I lost all sympathy for Dent and her supporters once the name calling and obscenities were unleashed. I’m not sure who committed the worst of the ethical breaches that took place here.

Enter Big Weasel

Big Weasel is John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who came under fire last year when it was revealed he used a pseudonym to make derogatory comments about competitor Wild Oats in Yahoo finance forums at a time when Whole Foods was in discussions to acquire Wild Oats.

While investigations were under way, and the company was under the spotlight, Big Weasel took time off from his blog and his other “online diversions.” Now that he’s been cleared by the courts and the regulators, Big Weasel is back with a sweeping blog post explaining why, despite everything that happened, it was OK to do what he did.

My first reaction: shut up John. I lost a lot of respect for Mackey and Whole Foods when all of this came out last year, and I am losing more with this return performance. It’s like finding out that the founders of Ben and Jerry’s had been hanging out with Eliot Spitzer and were referred to in court documents as Clients 10 and 11 respectively. He does apologize in the post, but with so much justification that the apology gets completely watered down.

Let’s look at some of what passes for Big Weasel’s reasoning. In defense of his failure to disclose his identity on the Yahoo forums, Big Weasel (or more likely his corporate communications people) writes:

“In online communities such as Yahoo!, the use of screen names is the normal custom as it allows posters to totally engage in the various discussions and debates that were taking place there. An online screen name is a great ‘equalizer’ between people.”

Nonsense. This would not apply to the officer of a publicly held corporation. Admittedly, some 60-year-old truckers use screen names like hotteencheerleader472, to equalize things, but we expect more from someone in Big Weasel’s position.

“The true identity in the outside world is irrelevant for purposes of participation in these communities.”

Uh, not according to the SEC’s financial disclosure laws (aka “Reg FD“), or Sarbanes Oxley. Officers of publicly held companies have special obligations when communicating materially about those companies.

Big Weasel then goes on to claim an error in judgment. Again — hello? You’re the CEO of a publicly held company. Your campaign on Yahoo was carried out deliberately over a period of years. The fact that you hid your identity is damnable. Your suggestion that you misinterpreted the situation and suffered a monetary lapse in judgment is insulting to your customers and shareholders.

Big Weasel also asserts that he was simply exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. Any first-year journalism student knows that the First Amendment does not guarantee unlimited freedom to speak. It guarantees freedom of speech, which includes the right to be free from harmful speech.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said in Schenck v. United States “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” We also have laws against hate speech, and in commercial enterprises, against making misrepresentations of product superiority or company financial performance. These laws are designed to protect consumers, and we know from the excesses and outright theft perpetrated on them by Enron and others during the dot-com bust, that such protections are necessary.

That Big Weasel would play to the obviously liberal bias of Whole Foods’ customers and shareholders with a First Amendment ploy like this is transparent (a new adventure for Mackey) and reprehensible.

I cannot believe that someone as smart as John Mackey, who built the Whole Foods empire, and has been at the helm of the company for 28 years, could not know he was in ethically dicey territory.

A 16-word comment on Big Weasel’s blog sums the situation up quite nicely: “A corporate officer anonymously posting about their own company and their competitors. Seems unethical to me.”

So, in the case of John Mackey, aka Big Weasel, I am unable to find sympathy. He has the public trust, and he represents a corporation who’s fortunes directly affect the lives of thousands of people. He is answerable to all of these people, and to the SEC, FASB, the FTC ahead of his desire to indulge his misdirected sense of justice or need for self expression.

If I ran Whole Foods corporate communications, I would ban Mackey for life from blogging or otherwise having any kind of direct social media presence.

Such are the stories of Little Weasel and Big Weasel. Both men committed ethical lapses, though clearly, of totally different magnitudes. Is one worse than the other? I think so.

Tags: Moli, Sabrina Dent, Whole Foods, John Mackey, astroturfing

Michael Arrington recently credited Twitter for being “constructively responsive to criticism,” citing a post on the Twitter blog in which the beleaguered company responds to a TechCrunch post asking about Twitter’s IT strategy.

You can see Twitter’s response, as approved by their corporate communications team, here, but I obtained a pre-release draft of the blog post, which I have reproduced below. The portions highlighted in yellow were deleted prior to posting of the Q&A. It gives as a unique glimpse into the minds of the people running the Twitter machine.

Tags: twitter, leaked Q&A, techcrunch

In an attempt to show that he is holding Twitter’s technological feet to the fire for their recent IT meltdown, Michael Arrington, in a brief article in yesterday’s Washington Post, poses the tough question:

“Is it true that you only have a single master MySQL server running replication to two slaves, and the architecture doesn’t auto-switch to a hot backup when the master goes down?”

Why is this article in the Washington Post? I doubt even one per cent of the Post’s readers understand SQL database technology, so with statistical margin of error, it’s fair to say no one reading the Post would understand this.

Not only is the piece not written in terms most readers can understand, it’s boring, it’s repetitive of what has already appeared on Twitter’s blog and on TechCrunch, and it comes from someone who isn’t an expert on SQL databases in the first place. So where is the editorial value here? And isn’t Michael Arrington the one who shuns traditional media like the Washington Post because it’s all happening in the blogosphere, baby?

And any idiot knows if your server is already correctly configured, you can obtain the master status and then use mysqldump to take a snapshot! (If you want to get into the tech jargon game, all you have to do is go to MySQL help info online to grab some impressive tech crap like I just did.)

Arrington closes by saying Twitter is being “constructively responsive to criticism.” I disagree. Saving that for another post.

It’s a testament to the madness that is going on in communications that we have come to this point. The circle will be completed when Valleywag picks up Arrington’s piece and headlines it “Arrington and WAPO: bizarre master/slave hot swapping sex scenario is only way to fix Twitter.”

Tags: Twitter, Washington Post, mysql, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch