When You Steal It, Admit It

By and large, I find marketing people to be vapid, oxygen wasters. Not because I find the art and pseudo-science of Marketing to be inherently evil—I don’t. After all, I’m a marketing director. But it bothers me that marketing people come into their positions, usually without a shred of industry experience, and then start blogging about best practices and tips like you’d think they invented the damned topic.

And the Digital Asset Management industry is full of examples of this. We’ve seen DAM News take on an unnamed DAM vendor for stealing content on several occasions. Recently, I also had to send a takedown notice to a company that had stolen content right off the Picturepark website.

And, really, this is bad enough. But when one marketing director uses his CMSWire authoring slot to steal copy verbatim from a CMSWire article written by the marketing director of a competing company, this is below low. In fact, it’s shameful.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote called “Lost in the DAM,” which CMSWire published on March, 12 2014:

Here’s an excerpt from a piece called “6 Reasons Why People Don’t Use Your DAM,” written by Neil Monahan, marketing manager for Brandworkz, and published by CMSWire on August 20, 2014:

Thank you for the vote of confidence, Mr. Monahan. But I’m not Wikipedia. 

Here’s what I would like to have happen from this:

1. I would like Mr. Monahan to publicly apologize for his plagiarism, to me and any other authors from whom he has stolen content. And I would like him to remove that content from the Internet.
2. I would like CMSWire to require their contributing authors to verify that all materials submitted are original, not copied in any way from another source, and not written by a ghost writer. After all, if we are to trust CMSWire content to be valuable and educational, we should have some assurance that it is so, to the best of their knowledge.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with someone learning from something I’ve written and using that knowledge in their work—that’s why I do what I do. But it irks me when someone tries to pass himself off as some sort of DAM expert when, in fact, copy & paste is the only expertise that has been adequately demonstrated. 

The Digital Asset Management industry has enough problems without being polluted with nonsense written by (or stolen by) people who don’t know enough about what’s going on to speak from experience and tell their own stories.

UPDATE: CMSWire has since removed the three numbered points from Mr. Monahan’s article and replaced them with a link to my article. I was not told of any policy changes that would be made as a result of this. I will update this post if that happens. Mr. Monahan has also emailed me an apology in which he blames an intern whom he had to do his research. This, of course, made me feel stupid because all these years I’ve been doing my own DAM research. I didn’t even know that outsourcing expertise was an option. 

Why No One Trusts Your Content

When you think a vendor’s white paper sucks, tell them. Better yet, review it on a public forum. Force vendors to produce better content.

In writing about a white paper entitled, Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field, released by the CMO Council, author G. David Dodd got me thinking about why most content that’s released by vendors, well, sucks. (Read Mr. Dodd’s blog post here.) It doesn’t surprise me that only 9% of the respondents surveyed for the white paper said they valued content that came from vendors.

Nine percent is a slap in the face that most vendors actually deserve. I can recall many (many) years ago when I was hired as a freelancer to write a “white paper” for a company. I did my research and turned in what I thought was a fair and balanced assessment of the product. They were horrified. To avoid a lengthy story, I will say just that I learned what they actually wanted was an 8-page brochure that was written on a white paper template.

To make matters worse, I have learned over the years that most–MOST–readers don’t want actual white papers either. Perhaps we’ve been conditioned to not read more than 140 characters at a time, or our minds have been softened by too many infographics. Whatever the reason, I’ve found that few people read beyond the first few thousand words of anything. When I was first asked to write for CMSWire, I was told that “around 600 words” was the optimal size for a post. So each month, as I sit down to write my article, I keep that number in mind—you know, as a multiplier for how many words I’ll actually write. (600 x 2, 600 x 3, etc.)

Picturepark is the first employer I’ve had who has permitted me to produce content that is not Sell! Sell! Sell! in nature. I think that shows under the Digital Asset Management menu our website. I think it also shows in our “Enterprise DAM Checklist” white paper, which easily passes Mr. Dodd’s test of credibility in that without the branding (and the last paragraph that mentions Picturepark as the publisher), there are no clues throughout the paper’s 45 pages about who wrote it or what it’s trying to sell. In fact, the paper is so software-neutral that any DAM vendor whose product is based on technologies that are standards-based, non-proprietary and less than a hundred years old could share the paper with its own prospects. (No, that is not a license to do so, you silly DAM vendors! Do your own work and stop copying off my paper!) 😉

I think the main problem we face as content providers and consumers is three fold:

1. As I mentioned above, most people don’t read larger documents, which gives content producers an excuse to avoid writing them.
2. Most content providers are marketroids who haven’t a clue what they’re talking about, but were taught last week in marketing school that “content is king.” So they write their “5 steps to becoming a better human” articles and white papers and pat themselves on the back when the leads come rolling in.
3. And that leads to the big problem: It seems that for 99.9% of vendors, content’s main focus is to generate leads, not educate. They don’t care whether what they offer is valuable because once the download form has been submitted, they have what they want. Worse, their main audience is the GoogleBot, not the reader. So they stuff blog posts with keyword terms designed to get them ranking higher in search engine results placement (SERP). Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with legitimate SEO tactics—after all, there is a lot of noise on the Web. But when “SERP” and “lead-gen” are goals for content—content that should be designed to educate—you get numbers like 9% when you ask how many readers trust it.

I encourage you to read Mr. Dobb’s post and spend some time in his blog. There is some good stuff in there.