I love free services like YouTube, Posterous and Twitter. They have become an important part of the way I operate online. They make my life easier and help me succeed.
But there’s a problem with this increasing dependency – a sting that can cause short bursts of acute pain. Here’s a classic example…
The day I got stung
At 7.00am, Monday morning, I went to upload my weekly episode of BLACK CHAIR Business Mentoring TV, and was confronted with the following message on YouTube:
“We are currently performing site maintenance. Be cool – we’ll be back 100% in a bit.”
Ouch! Sure, site maintenance is important. If I had know about it, I would have planned for it, as is the case with other services I use e.g. web hosting. They give a couple of weeks notice as to when they are scheduling maintenance, and I plan my online activities accordingly.
So I checked the following sources to see if maybe I had missed a warning or some kind of news as to what was happening and when it would be fixed:
- YouTube main page
- YouTube Twitter
- YouTube Twitter (Australia)
- Google main page
- Google blog
- Google Australia blog
- Google – general search for issues online and/or maintenance schedule
- Twitter search
- Google Australia – I rang their Australian office and got a very friendly person who said she knew nothing about it, but would email Google US to find out what had happened and then call me back.
The result? Nothing. This exercise took me about 20mins and I couldn’t find out what the problem was or when the full service would be restored. So I left it and got on with my day. Some three hours later, things were back to normal and I could upload my video. Cool! PS: I didn’t get a call back from Google Australia. No worries. I’m still a huge fan.
The moral of the story
YouTube is a wonderful free service. In your opinion, does the fact that it is free make any expectations I have about getting responsive customer service e.g. maintenance or key issue notifications, unfair or redundant?
The hidden sting for me in this free service was being left abandoned when things went wrong. It’s a good lesson. I’m currently reviewing my usage and dependence on all of the free services I use.
Your thoughts…
What would be the consequences if one or all of the free services you rely on suddenly went down?
What customer service expectations do you have of free services?
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10 Responses to this post
March 31, 2010 at 3:09 pm |
I think it’s just unlucky and you have to accept it can happen any time. I’ve had the same problem with my Coles online shopping order but at least they refund me my $5 delivery fee it there’s a problem. With free services you can’t get your money back. Lol:)
March 31, 2010 at 3:21 pm |
Yes, and it’s that unpredictability with no real recourse of action that makes it dangerous to rely on.
Thanks, Annabel. Great to see you.
Best, Robin
March 31, 2010 at 3:38 pm |
Your point’s very interesting, which is that the price of a free service is giving up consumer rights. As a non paying consumer you have only influence, which is different from rights. By comparison, the underclasses who staqed the French Revolution had influence, and turned that into rights which now underpin most of what we now enjoy in terms of social freedoms and open markets. Ironically, the Social Media front of the Digital Revolution has bypassed traditional B2C rights and replaced them with mere influence by making services free. So if the free server says “Let them eat cake” then all we can do is rattle the cage. Delicious turn around!
April 5, 2010 at 8:40 pm |
That’s a great comment, mate. Thank you. Yes, it’s very sobering to realize the ‘unsaid’ contract implicit in the free service.
Best, Robin
April 1, 2010 at 12:04 pm |
We have no customer service expectations of free services. But it’s certainly well worth having a strategy if there’s a fail.
Back in October 2009 we had a Twitter account that was hacked. At the time, 1500 followers, and we were using it daily and, relying on it for the projects we had going.
OK, these things happen. But our hack rendered the account inoperable after a password change. The good news was that nobody could use it. The bad news, that included us. This caused a major headache for over a week until Twitter sorted out the problems with hackers. We assumed and planned for a total fail on that account.
But it made us put in place a strategy when not being able to use key, social, free services. I guess it’s that not all all eggs in one’s basket thing.
Not a big fan of YouTube for techy HD reasons and prefer Vimeo. There is a paid option with Vimeo for a pro account but we’ve never had to use Customer Service. One answer is to have a YouTube and a Vimeo account and just switch if one failed.
International time zones have a big impact. What do you do if your site’s down when asleep? It happens. What’s the plan for a site hack? Eight hours of lost traffic or broadcast is big chunk of time and we’d feel it. I used to get really annoyed about these things but not any more. Especially if it’s completely out of one’s hands! All you can do is go to a plan B. But have a plan B with any online service.
Best, Luke
April 5, 2010 at 8:42 pm |
Wise words, Luke. Your contribution is excellent. Yes, it’s easy to neglect the Plan B – done so at one’s peril.
Best, Robin
April 1, 2010 at 4:34 pm |
I agree with Luke.
I use YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and have looked into hosting my own. I prefer Vimeo for all the right reasons and even have a Pro account. However be very careful to read the terms fine print. Essentially you can’t have ANY commercial objective for your video there.
But there’s another reason to use YouTube, which you alluded to this morning Robin. That it’s the 2nd largest search tool on the web. If you want to drive traffic with video (which not all do, it’s true) you can’t avoid YouTube.
Doesn’t mean you have to embed your YouTube videos on your blog site though. You can host a copy of the video there, then embed another copy from Vimeo, or even self-hosted (Amazon AWS with cloudfront rocks for performance here)
This gets you past your issue, and is a neater more professional looking solution to boot.
If anyone is interested, I’d be delighted to talk more about using video to make your business stand out on the web.
All the best
Rog42
April 5, 2010 at 8:50 pm |
Nice build, Rog. Thanks. Robin
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