I blog on The Social Penguin and over on the blog for my consultancy, Velocity Digital. Last week, one of my posts on the Velocity blog made it through Social Media Today curation and appeared on the site. I was happy with that as SMT gets great traffic and can only be good for my 'personal brand' awareness. Yes, I did just say "personal brand," you can slap me next time I see you.
Since that happened, the search I have set-up for my name (a must have thing for all people that create content) over on mention.net has been inundated with alerts showing me the plethora of other websites and blogs that have taken the post from SMT (quite possibly automatically in many cases - that doesn't make it any better) and whacked it up on their site. You may be wondering why I'm freaking out. You may be thinking, "Surely, that is great for your personal brand?" It isn't great. Why?
- Many of the sites are of a quality that is of the horse-s**t variety and I don't want my name associated with them
- Sites that cover beauty, cars, and celeb news have put the post on their site - where is the relevance?
- They never, ever provide a link to me or the original post. Some even make it look as if it is their work
- Nobody ever asks if they can do it. That's what really gets my goat.
STOP IT, YOU ROBBING SEWER MONKEYS!
I could go after all of these sites and ask them to remove the content, but funnily enough, I don't have the time. Over 100 sites, in this instance! In the majority of cases this amounts to breach of copyright. The thing is, I wouldn't be that fussed, as long as they attributed the posts correctly and, at a push, had a link.
What can be done about it? Probably not that much without a hell of a lot of work and time. Is your content getting ripped off across the web? How does it make you feel?
image: stealing ideas/shutterstock