This chapter reviews the plethora of user-generated video activity and the issues it creates for knowledge management activities. The ability for individuals to create and post videos online has become prolific and it has now become a source of potential liability for employees and the firm. Video can be used convey rich narratives that can facilitate sensemaking and knowledge sharing and transfer, but their needs to be standards and controls for content development and distribution. When video content is developed, structure and culture are important factors that must be considered in storytelling activities to increase the opportunity for effective sensemaking and message retention and to ensure the accuracy, relevance, and legitimacy of video content. Evidence and arguments are presented that should motivate organizations and academics to review video generation activities both internal and external to the organization. Issues concerning video content delivery, liability, spam, and search engine capabilities are discussed. Opportunities for new research inquiries are identified.
TopIntroduction
Web users in the U.S. enjoy their video -- more than 11 billion clips were viewed online in July 2008 alone. That's up from nine billion videos in July 2007. On average, YouTube alone receives more than 60,000 uploads of copyrighted and uncopyrighted videos daily. YouTube, along with blogs and online networking sites MySpace and Facebook, have helped drive video sharing activity (Wall Street Journal, 2008).
The problem is that many of these videos frequently contain content that is protected by copyright. The use of copyrighted material without permission can lead to litigation – for the individual who posted it, the organization where they work, the site that hosted the material, or any combination of the above.
Two years ago, illegal use of professionally created video was rampant on the Web, particularly on video sharing sites such as YouTube. Among those most visibly undercut was NBC Universal, which asked YouTube to take down the infamous “Lazy Sunday” video from Saturday Night Live, after 5 million unauthorized viewings, and Viacom, which filed a $1 billion suit against YouTube parent Google to stop illicit publishing of their content. Now, a year after YouTube introduced its Video Identification tool to stem misuse, automated systems are being used to identify and protect professionally produced content (Sandoval, 2008).
This paper examines the user-generated video phenomena and its implications for organizations and their knowledge management activities. It examines risk issues that user-generated video creates for organizations, especially video content liability. This issue is examined within the context of knowledgetransfer activities and storytelling. Organizational culture is shown to be an important factor in helping to shape what video content is developed and shared by firm employees. Video search engines and their potential role in protecting organizations from content liability issues are also examined. The objective of exploring user-generated video capabilities is to focus knowledge management’s awareness on the rapid growth and proliferation of user-generated video so that effective approaches to managing user-generated video creation and sharing activities can be developed and deployed. In creating an organizational strategy, it is important that it be grounded in a clear understanding of how user-generated videos can be both a potential asset and a liability to the organization.
Video-related issues are now routinely in the press and many times matters relate to social networking and legal concerns. For example, MySpace plans to adopt a new video-identifying technology that will attempt to resolve copyright issues for some of the video clips users upload to its site. The technology, from a third-party company called Auditude, is in essence a form of fingerprinting technology that scans videos for professional –and often copyrighted -- content. Auditude's system indexes uploaded videos against more than one billion minutes of content from its library. Industry executives say such fingerprinting technology is key to resolving thorny copyright battles between media and technology companies over online video. Viacom's has employed its own similar technology and its use led to a $1 billion suit against Google Inc. Google's YouTube, accusing it of massive intentional copyright infringement and demanding that YouYube remove 100,000 infringing video clips. Viacom claimed that YouTube failed to prevent its users from posting pirated material to the site (Sandoval, 2008).
Video’s generated by individuals is a social phenomenon that has not only affected social networking, but organizations as well. Melcrum (2007), a research firm, reports that while much of the interest in social media has centered on the adoption of blogging as a business tool for communicating with customers and staff, online video is, in fact, the number one application. They point out that corporations have taken note of the popularity of sites like MySpace, YouTube and Bebo and that they are beginning to integrate the same functionality and networking tools within their corporate intranets. Melcrum (2007) reports that the two most important applications for internal user-generated video are identified by organizations as improved employee engagement and improved internal collaboration.