One of the facts of corporate life is that sometimes business models change. Financial or investor pressures have a habit of intruding into the entrepreneur’s ideals and they’re forced to make decisions that they would never have considered in an ideal world or embraced into their original vision. It happens to us all.
I sense this financial reality in TextAmerica’s recent missive to its subscribers, sent to me by Alfie at MoblogUK:
Update to the TA Community insiders: Due to the complicated nature of the planned upcoming move to a private paid members only community, changes will not be formally announced until sometime in August. Current ‘free sites’ will be suspended starting July 1 with a planned deletion scheduled for the fall 2006. DO NOT QUESTION me about these changes as NOTHING will be said in advance of the official notices. THANK YOU for your consideration in this regard…
If you don’t know, part of TextAmerica’s service is that they store people’s photos and videos, which can then be shared with friends and family and the wider TA community. Of course, they’re free to change their business model, although you have to wonder a bit at the tone of this message.
So the problem here is that their service has a deep emotional meaning to their customers. They’re not announcing that car part 357 will be replaced with 457 next month. Or that a bank’s interest rate will be reduced by .25%. They’re announcing that they’re going to delete people’s digital memories that are stored on their system.
Suppose if I don’t get their email and I go and look for my only copy of the photo I took of dear old Aunt Ethel, who died yesterday? Imagine how I’m going to feel if I’m told that it had been lost forever and that I’d been advised several times that it would happen. It’s reminiscent of Arthur Dent, the planning application and the Vogons.
Fortunately, there is an obvious solution to this potential PR disaster. Alfie, noticing an influx of TA users has invited all TA users to move their free accounts to Moblogging UK. A TA user has even written a bit of freeware that does the job that can be downloaded here and can be used to export data for TA and imported to anywhere else.
This isn’t about TA bashing by any means. They offer a very good service as far as I know and they’re free to change their modus operandi. But when your change has such visceral implications for many of their users, I think they need to be very careful how they implement these changes. It would be so easy to become victims of a very nasty hate campaign if they screw with people’s photos and memories.
If I were TA, I’d certainly consider changing my tone a little about this. But more importantly, I’d offer my users alternative sources of free storage, which might, or might not, include Alfie’s crew. That way, they can be seen to solve a problem, not just present a problem, which is at the heart of good customer service. This also means that protecting people’s digital memories becomes an SEP - or Someone Else’s Problem.
But for those accounts which aren’t exported, I’d also advise them to be very sure to keep back up copies for a long, long time, even if they aren’t accessible by users directly. If they are responsible for protecting the cherished memory of the late Aunt Ethel, they need to be able to rescue this image when they are asked.
SHAME ON YOU TEXT AMERICA !!!
Thank you Russell for finding this story and blogging about it.
You (and Carlo) and I (and my co-blogger Alan) and many more of us heavy bloggers can afford storage space. Many of those customers who were attracted to TextAmerica’s free sites are not that fortunate. Some don’t own PCs at all, and for many I am sure it is their currently only viable storage space for pictures.
But its also more than that. It is the clear promise TextAmerica had made as it recruited members to join their mobile blogging/picture blogging network. They promised to store these images.
What they now are about to do is wrong. Totally wrong. I immediately blogged about it in support of you in my referring posting “Tempting the ire of a digital community - TextAmerica about to delete stored memories”. It is at my blogsite http://www.communities-dominate.blogs.com
And I am now going to ask for other bloggers to join in and protest this. I will also post about it at Forum Oxford. I will ask the Engagemnt Alliance to consider carrying my protest posting about TextAmerica.
If this is what TextAmerica ends up doing, it goes against all the fundamental elements of the blogosphere. Transparency, truth, honesty, respect, and permanent digital tracks to record the history.
A company that claims to be the “leading mobile blog company” cannot so blatantly go against the blogosphere.
I feel a particularly strong personal mission about this contemplated action by TextAmerica, as this reminds me of the Kryptonite incident from two years ago. My book Communities Dominate Brands makes the point right from the title on, that if you challenge a community, you lose. TextAmerica cannot go through with this (in this way) and emerge with their reputation intact. Quite the opposite. This may be their death-nail.
Thank you Russell for blogging this. I will try to gather more support for you around this. A shame. Shame shame shame. TextAmerica please immediately reconsider !!!
Tomi Ahonen
4-time bestselling author and blogger
Founding member Engagement Alliance, Forum Oxford, Carnival of the Mobilists, Wireless Watch
latest book Communities Dominate Brands
website http://www.tomiahonen.com
blogsite http://www.communities-dominate.blogs.com
Is this a dumb thing for TextAmerica to do? Yes.
Is it within their rights? I am not a lawyer, but I think the answer is yes. In their terms of service they say they can cut you off at any time. You can find similar clauses in the terms of service of most blogging services.
However, the other thing I found in their terms was this:
“Textamerica.com may use, sell and/or share with its affiliates any information provided by you on this website, including your name, e-mail address, usage patterns, and uploaded images and text.”
Wow, so by posting something you give them ownership of it. Plus they can sell all your personal information to anyone they label an “affiliate” (and there is no definition of what an affiliate is). That is not typical of other blogging services I’ve seen, and would by itself be a good reason not to do business with them.
Mike