Customer service nears real time

Categories: Community Marketing, Social MediaPosted on August 10th, 2007

Apparently, my new friends at Hunter and Associates are in need of embedding our media player, I saw this last night, just minutes after it hit my trackbacks. I tried to leave a comment, but it required users to regsiter to their site, I registered but never received a login email. (Please consider relaxing on the comment restrictions, Wordpress is great in catching spammers)

I tried to support from that site, but it’s not working, no problem, I’ll help from here: I realize this is a hosted version of Wordpress that you’re trying to support, so try clicking on the “share” button and then grabbing the code and embedding. If that doesn’t work there’s a small checkbox that says “embedding in wordpress”, click that. Then try embedding.

I really believe in rapid customer service on the web (you will hear my preaching about it on this blog frequently) and this is the second time that I’ve seen this issue, here’s where I responded to Thomas on an early morning.

Now that I see this issue twice, I realize that there’s a pattern, which is a signal that we need to improve things, thanks for the open public feedback in a professional way, I’ll suggest this to the right folks. We’re listening.

The Hunters are smart, want my attention? Link to me, I read every incoming post that’s non-splog.

Also see this “how to embed a podtech player“

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 5:56 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media. 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.

Hi Jeremiah
I don’t understand the comments failure, you’re registered as a new user, I received email notification - I’ll test this notification to new users - I apologize for the aggravation, and thanks for the quick work.

Now, PodTech - the code you generate for wordpress.com doesn’t work in the self-hosted versions of WordPress. This is a common occurrence with many other widgest and things. But the modification would have to be pretty simple you’d think.

A similar issue arose when YouTube changed to their new “feature” of displaying “related videos” at the end of all embedded clips across the Web. This was unwelcome to many webmasters, and wordpress.com adapted the YouTube switching code to turn the feature off. Self-hosted WordPress people had to play around with code on their own to figure out how to do it.

Not a criticism of the wonderful and free WordPress.

Point is, a development discussion between the WordPress community and PodTech might be useful to get this resolved - if in fact it’s an issue.

If it’s just me, maybe some webmaster out there has the tweak, and can tell us. I don’t see it in the WP forums anywhere.

link to the YouTube discussion at WP:
http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=5157&page&replies=10

and I’m still trying to open a discussion at WP on this podtech issue. I’ll send the link if the WP system lets me

-Ross

Posted by Ross Hunter on August 10th, 2007 at 7:42 am

Ross

Thanks, I’ll check my inbox again for the email, maybe it went into bulk. No worries

I’m going to share all this info with the right folks at PodTech, and will get back to you as soon as I hear more.

THANK YOU

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on August 10th, 2007 at 7:55 am

Hey Guys,
I registered on HunterHost a while back and the verification went right to my spam folder. It took 2 tries before I checked there.
Jeremia: Awesome response time! and on a trackback, too.

Posted by The TrackSuit CEO on August 10th, 2007 at 8:19 am

Thanks Tracksuit CEO

I’ve still not seen the email, another great reason to open up the comments, as email is ‘broken’.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on August 10th, 2007 at 8:38 am

Jeremiah, thanks for your suggestions, I do use Akismet already, and I’ve just removed the registration requirement for comments.

I’ve started a forum thread with more information at WP on this:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/129704?replies=1#post-601178

perhaps your tech people would like to post over there as well as here - either way, I’ll update the thread with the fix when we get one.

Thanks for all your help

Posted by Ross Hunter on August 10th, 2007 at 9:24 am

Guys, here’s what I’ve found when trying to embed uncommon video types (such as Brightcove and PodTech) on WordPress blogs. The TinyMCE visual editor tool in Wordpress is the problem. It will often strip out or corrupt the player code when you go to save the blog post. The solution is to turn off the visual editor (in your account settings) when embedding video. Also, do not let anyone come back later and open up the blog post with the visual editor on; it’ll screw up the video code as well. Cheers.

Posted by Michael Bazeley on August 10th, 2007 at 4:14 pm

Hi Michael
Yes, I wish WP would get rid of tinyMCE. It’s not the problem however, I was seeing before that the source code hadn’t been altered, but now I have the editor turned off to be sure.

It almost works but not quite. PodTech generates embedding code for wordpress.com hosted blogs, using a long URL surrounded by [square brackets], which the wordpress.com platform recognizes. Not the same for the stand-alone versions however.

When I change to regular angle brackets, and throw in a width and height, I can get the layout, and the browser calls to PodTech, but nothing loads. There’s something in the actual URL that PodTech is supplying that doesn’t quite work in this situation, I believe.

I’ll supply full code details over in the WP forum, maybe someone either at PodTech or in the wild can figure how to tweak the URL.

It’s just a small tweak required here.

Jeremiah, if a tech person happens to get involved they can get the full details at the WP forum I linked earlier, I’ll go over there next.

Do have a great weekend everybody, and thank you!

Posted by Ross Hunter on August 10th, 2007 at 8:52 pm

Once again I am impressed by how quick you is to respond to any type of customer service oriented issues.

I have tried using Google Alerts, but I find I receive alerts sparodically and not very timely. Apparently you have some kind of arrangement that I don’t and are able to get your search results more quickly.

Posted by Thomas on August 10th, 2007 at 10:28 pm

Ross, thanks for your thoughts, I’ll let you know what I uncover on my end.

Thomas, yes I have a special arrangement, Larry and Sergey and I go waaaay back. No just kidding, I saw this in my trackbacks. I have the same tools that everyone else does!

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on August 11th, 2007 at 12:47 am