Protecting and Promoting Your Brand on the Social Web
The social web has proven itself a profitable avenue for corporate marketing. Many brands are actively producing content in the form of images, videos, websites, and blogs to take advantage of the opportunities that the social web presents. However, like all mediums, the social web comes with its own set of risks: plagiarism, duplicate content, and reputation management are all challenges that accompany the creation and sharing of online content. Furthermore, whether you are intentionally spreading your content or not, it is being shared.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism has been a natural threat to media and artists long before the internet, but because online theft doesn’t rob you of physical property, online theft often goes unnoticed. Nearly every company has property, or content, in the form of a website— and this content is easy to steal. Whether or not you are openly sharing your content, it’s very easy for individuals to use your copy, videos, images, and software for themselves without giving you any credit.
Plagiarized copies of your content can dampen the credit you should be receiving in the minds of individuals and in the eyes of the search engines. Moreover, even if you are given credit and a link, there is a good chance you don’t want to be associated with whoever is lifting your content without permission.
Tools for Finding and Preventing Plagiarism
There are several useful ways to find and prevent plagiarism. The first step is to ensure that you actually have the rights to the content. Adding a simple copyright clause to the bottom of the website generally does the trick. However, if you are intentionally sharing your content, you can make use of a creative commons license which helps you define the limits of what you’re willing to let people do with your content.
Once you have the ability to hold someone’s feet to the fire for stealing your content, you’re ready to setup some tools for finding and addressing plagiarizers. Two of our favorites at Neboweb are Copyscape and Tracer.
Copyscape
Copyscape searches the web for any pages that have content matching your domain, and they also provide you with a banner to let people know you’re serious about protecting your content:
A good example of this is from a site stealing our firm’s website copy in June 2009. See below:
Our site (www.NeboWeb.com)
Site with stolen copy:
Although imitation is the sincerest from of flattery, our legal team has sent the “unnamed” firm above a cease and desist letter. In the past year we’ve identified at least 20 websites through Copyscape that have violated our copyright infringement rights. As I said previously, these tools are quite useful.
Tracer
Tracer approaches the security of your site in a very tangible way by detecting attempts to copy your text or images and placing a link back to your site when the content is pasted. This is a great way to monitor who is taking your content and how they are using it. Also, if you are using a creative commons license and don’t mind people using your content appropriately, this is a great way to build links for your site which will drive traffic and help you rank better in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
It’s also important to note that some types of content are very difficult to protect. For example, there has been some buzz recently by people insinuating that the creative and design aspects of the travel portal for Microsoft’s Bing is copied and/or at the very least heavily inspired by the design from the popular travel site Kayak. Because design is by nature ethereal and conceptual, Kayak is probably not likely to invest the time and money pursuing a legal battle with Microsoft.
Additionally, there could be other reasons for the similarities including common API and data sources as one commenter indicated. However, if you have conclusive evidence that someone has wrongfully taken your content, it’s always worth looking into your legal options. Below are 2 screenshots of Bing and Kayak for comparison:
Duplicate Content
Being plagiarized doesn’t only mean you get less credit than you deserve, it also presents a danger to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. If your content starts appearing in too many places on the web, the major search engines may penalize your pages for duplicate content. This can have a dramatically negative effect on your rankings and thus on your traffic and overall presence online. While many SEO campaigns take great pains to prevent duplicate content on their own domain, plagiarism is a dangerous outside source of duplicate content that is often overlooked.
A note on syndicating your content: even if you are gaining publicity and traffic from your content it’s important to be careful about who you are letting do the republishing and in what setting your content is being placed. If you syndicate your content too much, especially on sites that aren’t representing it in a unique setting, you may begin to see the penalties of duplicate content. However, as long as you stick to reputable providers and outlets, pushing out your content and building links back to your site should have a positive impact.
Reputation Management
Ultimately protecting your content is a form of reputation management. There are two ways to manage your reputation, and you’ll need to use both to get the most out of your content. One way is to prevent your reputation from being negatively affected. That means protecting your reputation from sites or outlets that could tarnish or harm your brand.
Another way is ensuring that you actually have a reputation to protect. That means establishing a presence in search engines and knowing when it’s appropriate to share your content. A good reputation is the key to success. Whether it’s transferred subliminally through a byline at the end of an article or directly through word of mouth, individuals base their buying decisions on what they know of a brand’s reputation. With this in mind, it’s extremely important that you manage your reputation in a way that protects and promotes your brand.