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Plagiarized Content Will Kill You

Last week, a friend of mine, who is a reporter for USA Today, had an story she wrote for the paper plagiarized by tmcnet.com

Here’s Kelly Kennedy’s original story
Here’s the ripped off version attributed to Deborah Hirsch.

Notice a difference? Me neither.

The comments at the bottom of the article even call out plagiarism but the website hasn’t removed the story. So, using the example above, TMCNET will not only be dinged in rankings for duplicate content, their contributor, Debora Hirsch, will also be penalized for plagiarism.

Don’t make the same mistake by copying a related news story on to your business’ blog and calling it your own. It’s not clear exactly what the repercussions will be, but given today’s announcement, you might want to start looking at past blog posts, as well. Write your own intro sentence and link to the entire news story just to be on the safe side. This has always been a good blogging practice, but now it has implications.

Take Advantage and Create Thought Leaders Within Your Organization

And while we’re on the subject of blogging, you might want to think about who’s blogging for your site, as well as writing your contributed articles and blog posts for trade publications and content websites.

While writing a contributed article for a trade magazine is more work for your employees, no one can disagree that it’s a bad idea. Newsrooms are short-staffed these days and often, you’re more likely to land an article into a trade magazine if you write it yourself than if you sit in your office and wait for a reporter to call you.

Now that your employee’s name will be linked to everything they write, you can really take advantage of this opportunity to extend your thought leadership within your industry.

Thought leadership, whether it’s information coming from your CEO or your top sales guy, can demonstrate your company’s innovation, customer service, and show that you have business ideas that merit attention.

While in the past, it may have made sense to pass around the workload of writing contributed blogs and trade magazine articles, it appears to make more sense now to have one voice for your company online and have a single content creator.

There are a lot of future implications that can be imagined for businesses to take consider. For example, what if your thought leader gets another job? Do they take your web traffic to your competitor? That could shake things up not just for SEO managers, but for your entire public relations team.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is that great content comes from great authors. Choose wisely in your communications strategy and you won’t be scrambling to fix links every time Google adds to their search functionality.

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Image via CrunchBase

posted by Doyle

Most of you have seen it by now: Facebook hired one of the world’s largest PR firms (Burston-Marsteller) to execute a whisper campaign against Google over privacy issues. Irony of Facebook (pot) calling Google (kettle) out on privacy concerns aside, this entire episode was simply sad and continues to be handled badly by all concerned. This isn’t grey. It’s black and white, right and wrong:

• If Facebook, or any client, comes to a firm — especially a large, well-established firm like B-M — and asks that firm to do something like this, the firm should decline the assignment or the business, possibly both.
• Facebook, or any client with a department staffed by (alleged) PR professionals, should know better than to ask in the first place.
• If B-M, or any agency, takes such an assignment and gets caught, they can’t just throw the client under the bus and cash the check. Agencies are hired to advise as well as do the work. (Yes, sometimes individual employees make bad decisions. The company must then step up and make it right.)

The saddest byproduct of this entire mess is the shrugs and comments like “yeah, but this happens all the time. These guys just got caught.”

Sorry, but that’s nonsense. If Facebook has a problem with Google’s Social Circle, just come out and say so. Does anyone (B-M?) believe Facebook couldn’t get coverage by taking a stand? Of course not. They just wanted to play the “See? Everyone thinks Social Circle is bad!” card. If they would have been transparent, the message would have gotten out, the tech/social media community could have evaluated Facebook’s concerns and the discussion would have ensued. Instead, whether or not there is a privacy issue with Social Circle has been lost in the slime.

Sack up, Facebook. And same to you, B-M. I’m not so naive as to think this is an isolated incident, but that does not make it right. It hurt Facebook, it certainly hurt B-M and it was yet another black eye for the PR industry. I’m sorry to see this nonsense continue to happen, and I’d like to see some serious adult supervision to minimize the continued proliferation of stupid.

In the end, it’s easier than ever to do things like this. But the good news for all of us, is that’s it’s easier than ever to get caught. If doing the right thing isn’t enough to keep companies on the high road, maybe the fear of retribution will.

That’s an end that will justify the means.

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By now, it’s common knowledge that the news about Bin Laden’s death broke on Twitter and set new traffic records for the site. Donald Rumsfeld’s Chief of Staff, Keith Urbahn, was the first credible source to break the news last Sunday.

What is there to learn from this? Social engagement platform SocialFlow analyzed nearly 15 million tweets and bit.ly links to draw a connection between the news and the influencers. As the graphic above confirms, Keith Urbahn was the main influencer, as well as New York Times digital media reporter Brian Stelter, who shows up in the bottom right as the second hub of retweets. The conclusions you can draw from research, outlined in their blog post:

• While anyone can tweet, your bio does matter. Urbahn doesn’t brag about his insider connections, but enough people understood that he likely had good sources.
• It does not matter how many people follow you on Twitter or how often you tweet. At the time of the posting, Urbahn had a little more than 1,000 followers on Twitter. Stelter have more than 55,000 and tweets obsessively. Ultimately, his influence was less important that Urbahn’s.

SocialFlow alos pointed out that Urbahn was not the first to speculate on Bin Laden’s death, but he was the one that gained the most trust. “With that,” writes Social Flow, “the perfect situation unfolded, where timing the right social-professional networked audience, along with a critically relevant piece of information led to an explosion of public affirmation of his trustworthiness.”

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I hear of lots of businesses that want to build “an app.” They don’t really have an idea for what the app will accomplish for their business, they just think they want “an app” because it seems like a neat thing to do.

Let me be direct: having an app just for the sake of having an app isn’t going to move your needle.

Enter Chipotle.

I’ve always enjoyed Chipotle, but I’ve never seen one without a long line at lunchtime. That’s still true, but now I have the “license to cut in” app from Chipotle. Of course, that’s not what they call it, but that’s how it works out!

Why does the app make so much sense — and why has it increased my spend at Chipotle by at least three or four times?

• It’s easy. I eat the same two or three menue items, and I can pre-load them. I click about three times total in the whole process, and my order is waiting.
• It’s convenient. My debit card is pre-loaded, so I don’t even have to pay when I get there.
• It’s fast. I walk in, walk right by the line (which is usually to the door when I get there) and stroll up to the cash register. “Online order for Doyle,” I say and they hand me my bag. I’m usually in and out in less than one minute. I often get dirty looks. I don’t care.

Because it’s easy, convenient and fast, I now go to Chipotle a couple of times a week rather than a couple of times a month, and I tell others. An added benefit: I didn’t talk about Chipotle much before, if at all!

There are many outstanding apps that help me do business with a company. A few that come to mind include TripIt (the app is so helpful I buy the premium membership every year), Zinio (magazines on the iPhone or iPad at a reasonable price) and even the New York Times (yeah, I’m happy to pay for that level of reporting).

While some apps are just for fun and get your business in front potentially millions of users, too many make me scratch my head and wonder why.

When your client or your boss says, “we need an app!” think of Chipotle. Will it delight your customers, or is it an exercise in ego so you can say “we have an app?”

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Whether you are tweeting for yourself or tweeting for a brand/company it is important to make sure that you are putting the right message out there. Since Twitter allows you to send just about any message in 140 characters or less, that is plenty of space to influence your followers. However, it also leaves plenty of space to create a disaster of epic proportions.

Recently, two high-end fashion labels have made headlines for disastrous adventures in tweeting. In one instance it was a public meltdown of an intern who just so happened to handle the brand’s Twitter account and in the other, was the brand’s owner who offended thousands with his insensitive Tweet about Egypt.

The public meltdown of an intern:

The Brand: Marc Jacobs Intl. (@MarcJacobsIntl)
The Tweeter: The intern

So it seems that a Marc Jacobs intern couldn’t handle the pressures of their job. So, instead of just complaining to their friends after work, the intern chose to use @MarcJacobsIntl to have a public meltdown bashing both the company and the CEO.

For your entertainment here are some of the messages the intern tweeted on @MarcJacobsIntl during their infamous meltdown:

“You guys and gals have no idea how difficult Robert is. I am only an intern. My last day is tomorrow. I wouldn’t be tweeting this if not!”

“Good luck! I pray for you all. If you get the job! I’m out of here. See ya! Don’t want to be ya! Roberts a tyrant! Seriously! He is tough!”

“I can call him out! I’m out! Won’t work in this town again! I know that! Learned a lot. But, I don’t have the energy for what is expected!”

“Yea, walk in my MJ shoes! Don’t judge me! I’m alone in this office having to try and entertain you all. This isn’t easy. I have tried. Done!”

And my personal favorite:

“Spelling is hard for me. I hate this job. Hope they find someone soon. Robert is so picky! We have presented him with 50 people. He’s not happy.”

I really hope this intern realizes it will be close to impossible for them to find a job again after this little stunt.

Since this meltdown has happened, Hootsuite has added features to its program to prevent Twitter meltdowns and the sending of unintentional tweets. This feature, Secure Profiles, prompts users to confirm or cancel tweets before sending them. Although Secure Profiles is only available on the web, it is designed specifically for organizational teams so account owners can designate chosen social profiles as “secure” and team members are prompted to confirm or cancel messages before sending them out to the Twitterverse.

Then there is the brand owner not thinking before tweeting:

The Brand: Kenneth Cole (@KennethCole)
The Tweeter: Kenneth Cole himself

Back in February, a tweet was sent out on @KennethCole (signed by KC himself) using the trending topic #Cairo in order to promote his spring line and gain awareness. You can only imagine the uproar it caused given that the tweet was sent just as the political situation in Egypt was deteriorating rapidly, with increasing reports of violence against both anti-government protestors and impartial foreign observers in the area. Having sent out the offensive tweet at such a sensitive time not only damaged the company’s reputation but also the reputation of Kenneth Cole himself.

By the end of the day there were articles on the Huffington Post, CNBC and NY Daily News all discussing Kenneth Cole’s insensitivity in using the strife in Egypt for promotional purposes. For full details on the timeline of the uproar of the @KennethCole fiasco check out the post by Metzger account executive, Jill Thompson titled “Watching a Brand Unravel in 8 hours.”

The integrity of your Twitter messages can be crucial to not only your brand’s reputation, but also your personal reputation. This is especially true online where errant messages can be picked up and re-broadcast worldwide to an audience before you even realize the message exists. So bottom line: think before you tweet. If you feel the urge to engage in some verbal diarrhea, sit back take a deep breath, turn on your verbal filter and think about how the message you are about to send will affect not only yourself but your company as well.

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Tweet Deck and HootSuite are two indispensible tools for anyone managing numerous social media accounts. However, in the past few months we’ve all seen some pretty high-profile blunders. The most recent – and one that has been the talk of Twitter and countless blogs – involves an American Red Cross employee who accidently tweeted about a night out on the town from the Red Cross account.

HootSuite has responded to the concern by adding some new features. Check out Todd Wasserman’s article “HootSuite Adds Features To Help Prevent Twitter Meltdown,” on Mashable.

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I did communications for a hard disk drive company for about five years. We would replace any hard drive that was less than three years old, no questions asked. If we didn’t make the size you had any longer, we’d give you more capacity. All free of charge.

After the customer was relieved to learn he was getting a new drive, the next question we almost always got was “what about my data?” Sadly, there wasn’t much we could do about lost data.

Bottom line: most people don’t back up their data very well. The good news is that technology has become pretty reliable, so complete, catastrophic melt-downs are becoming more and more rare.

Despite our own lack of attention to backups, I continue to be amused at the uproar whenever there’s a hiccup in a “cloud” based service. Recently, a few folks (something like .02 percent of all Gmail users) lost Gmail access for awhile. I’m not making light of this, it would be a major hassle for me, but overall, Gmail is very reliable.

Let’s face facts: before scanners, almost no one had precious photos or other memories “backed up.” If there was a fire, flood or other loss, those things were simply gone. It’s far easier to back things up in a digital age, but most of us just don’t take the time. So why all the hand-wringing when a mistake happens “in the cloud?”

Here’s the deal: if it’s critical to you, make sure you have more than one digital copy, and it’s a good idea to back up both locally and remotely if it’s really critical. The folks at Google or MobileMe or any other “cloud” service probably do a better job than most of us backing things up, but they’re not perfect, and neither is any system. We’ve got to expect reliability from our providers and, at the same time, take some personal digital responsibility.

What’s your back-up plan?

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posted by Doyle

Andrew Worob let me drop by with a guest post on PR at Sunrise. Thanks for having me, Andrew!

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