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

One of the things that I’ve been recommending to my marketing clients, and one of the things that I did for Marketing Ninja today, is to have a brainstorming session where you determine what you’re going to write about and what you’re going to say to your readers in the long run.

There are a number of ways of doing this, but I think the easiest way to get organized is to use a Mind Map.

I’ve written about using Mind Maps before in the context of project organization.

Why Would I Want to Use a Mind Map?

A Mind Map is just one tool for organizing your business’ online message; there are a lot of options available, but I find that mind maps are better because:

• They are easier to read than bulleted lists;
• They are better for brain storming;
• They are much more interesting than bullets if you have to present your blogging ideas in a PowerPoint presentation;
• They are much more spatially efficient since you can branch out your ideas horizontally (lists grow mostly vertically;) and
• Mind Maps let you see what you’re thinking; bulleted lists don’t convey the same ideas with the clarity that a mind map has.

In addition, with a really good diagramming tool, you can actually build a mind map faster than you can outline it. I consult for SmartDraw so I use SmartDraw 2008.

How Do I Use A Mind Map To Organize My Company’s Online Message?

Let me show you what I did for Marketing Ninja.

Step 1. Start with a Few Initial “Big Topics”

I picked what I consider to be the three core areas that I write about:

• Social Media for Business;
• Trends in Social Media; and
• Social Media Technology.

Notice that I highlighted Social Media Technology with a different color; this is primarily because my blogging activity in that area is declining and I am moving more towards the marketing/social media focus.

Step 2. Refine Each “Big Topic” with a few Specific “Areas of Interest”

So I took my original list and expanded on each node with a few increasingly specified sub-topics; here’s what my Mind Map would look like in outline format:

• Social Media for Business
  • Blogging for Business
  • Field Guide to Social Marketing
  • Reference Guides
• Trends in Social Media
  • Etiquette
  • Niche Portals v. Digg
  • YHOO v. MSFT
  • GOOG v. MSFT
• Social Media Technology
  • ASP.NET
  • Design
  • Web 2.0
  • DBMS

See how I have much more space to get my information across when I have a Mind Map? Now we’re going to take it one step further.

Step 3. Refine, Add More Subtopics, Then Repeat

This chart is obviously too large to be read on the relatively narrow viewing pane of this blog, so you can see a full sized version of this image here. A bulleted list with this much content would be virtually unreadable, but a Mind Map is relatively manageable.

Basically all you do is you keep iterating through subtopics until you have covered the full set of possible topics. At that point you now have a Mind Map artifact that you can refer to when you want to write a new post but aren’t sure what direction to use.

Step 4. When Publishing New Content, Refer Back to the Mind Map

Does your content stay within the range of topics that you brainstormed using your Mind Map? If not then you may want to refine your idea until it does, your perhaps reevaluate the topics you explored during your brainstorming session.

Another possibility: do you need something to write about? Refer back to the mind map; after all, that’s where you can see your ideas whenever you’re suffering from writer’s block.

Getting your content’s messages organized is crucial to having a successful blogging campaign, and a mind map is a pretty good starting point for coming up with ideas and presenting them in a manner that is easy to communicate.

Downloads:

Marketing Ninja Full Mind Map [SmartDraw 2008 Format, Editable]

Marketing Ninja Full Mind Map [PDF Format, Read-Only]

Technorati Tags: Field Guide to Social Marketing,Mind Mapping