Marketing Ninja

This is a sample post from my Field Guide to Social Marketing.

I was reading up on DotNetKicks when I came across the most interesting headline I have ever seen on the site, “How YOUR tech blog posts are RIPPED OFF while you sleep!”

The post comes from Mike Duncan, a C# blogger, who discovered that a piece of his hard work was more or less stolen by InfoQ (rel=no follow; no PageRank+1 for you,) a developer-oriented news site.

To give you a quick summary of what the issue is in this instance:

TWO DAYS after my post[, "SQLite on .NET - Get up and Running in 3 Minutes"] was out in the wild, I started seeing some interesting inbound links coming in from InfoQ, a tech news – paid story aggregator type site. While not somewhere I go often, their site is indeed large, thriving, and as it turns out, morally bankrupt. It seems that one Robert Bazinet has a story on the front page of the 250,000 unique visitors per month, page rank 7, mega-site that is InfoQ.com cleverly titled “Up and Running with SQLite on .NET in 3 Minutes.”

So what do you do if you’re Mike Duncan? Someone else is profiting from your own content and you’re not getting adequate credit or compensation?

There are four options:

• Do Nothing
• Do Little
• Send in the Lawyers
• Raise Hell

Option 1 – Don’t Do Anything

If your content has been totally stolen, 100% stolen with 0% credit given to you in any way, shape, or form then please don’t bother reading this; you need to get SOME credit before you even consider doing this. However, in the case of Mike Duncan, he did get a link back, some referral traffic, and a little bit of name recognition, even though he still wasn’t given the appropriate amount of credit.

Are you happy seeing your words get out there, regardless of whom they are attributed to? Enjoying some of the minor referral traffic? Then don’t do anything.

Option 2 – Do Little

Pretty self-explanatory. Do it yourself and contact the author and ask that they respect your original work and give you the proper level of credit.

Option 3 – Send in the Lawyers

Sending in the lawyers simply isn’t an option for most bloggers or small organizations.

Here’s a quick decision tree which will help you decide whether or not it’s worth calling up some intellectual property lawyers:

This decision tree may be a little hard to read so I’ve included a full-sized version of this image here. Basically if the costs of pursuing legal actions are greater than the benefits, don’t do it.

Another thing to consider, though, is will legal action nip plagiarism from your site in the bud entirely or does it do nothing to prevent it from happening again in the future?

Option 4 – Raise Hell

This is the option I recommend for content owners who have already tried the “Do Little” option and don’t have the means to pursue the “Send in the Lawyers” option.

The objective of this option is to create enough noise and ill will towards the plagiarizer that the cost of not responding becomes greater than the value created by plagiarizing your content.

That being said, here are a few ways that you can go about “raising hell” when someone steals your content:

Again, this Mind Map is probably pretty hard to read, thus I’ve attached a full-sized version of the image here.

Does this “raise hell” option seem a little immature, pedantic perhaps? Yes, but it’s effective.

Technorati Tags: Plagiarism,Field Guide to Social Marketing

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