Patrick O’Keefe

My friend Jake McKee points out the American Cancer Society’s lifting of video content created by mutual friends of ours, Lee and Sachi LeFever of Common Craft (they are behind the great and popular Paperworks videos). Without saying more, I’ll just point to the videos. First, here is “Social Networking in Plain English” by Common Craft, released last June.

Cool video, right? OK, and here is the video by the American Cancer Society, titled “SocialConnect.org”.

Wow… something’s a little fishy there, for sure. Excusing the fact that the video is of a visibly lower quality to the one created by Lee and Sachi and, beyond the lifting of the script (I love how, in both videos, you know Bob, lol), a bigger problem is the complete lack of attribution or any mention at all of Common Craft.

I agree with Jake when he says that non profits have to play by the rules, too. I do this on my forums. Our guidelines apply to everyone… for profits, non profits, personal websites, major corporations… everyone plays by the guidelines.

I mean, it’s cool that they are getting online and that they are using video and Twitter and whoever is helping those with cancer is cool with me, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK to do this sort of thing. From reading their Twitter, it looks like they were at SXSW Interactive. So were Lee and Sachi! I met up with them. They apparently launched this site at SXSW. How cool would it have been if they would have have reached out to Common Craft before then and brought them on board (even to just get their blessing) and then involved them in the actual launch? That would have brought them more press and would have been an awesome way to kick it off. Instead, we have this.

Is this worth sharing?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.