Protecting Your Online Content in a Digital World

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to a another edition of maximize your social. If you've been following me on social media and listening to my podcast, you know that I've spent the last few weeks in a pretty unprecedented stream of travel literals, here around the world as I was in Europe, I did promise you, I was going to do a podcast from North Carolina where I was this week, but unfortunately, completely ran out of time, I'm going to see if I can piece together recording from my speech at Elon University, one of the many universities that is now using maximize your social as a textbook. But I want to go to today's topic, which is content. Now, if you've been listening to the podcast, you know, I talk a lot about the importance of contents. And at the beginning of this year, in 2014, I put out my six trends that I see evolving in social media this year. And one of the trends was undoubtedly the need to create exclusive content that you own unique and exclusive, that you can publish on your website share on social media, and what have you that perhaps some companies are trying to do too much engaging in social, when they should be creating more content that will help them scale their engagement. And as far as content goes, I've talked about this year really being a go big, or go home, you know, in maximize your social, I do talk about this notion of a frequency strategy. And I don't want you to take that too much to heart. Because, you know, I once didn't blog for three months on my own blog, and I wrote a blog post after that return, saying, You know what, I'm only going to blog when I have the passion. And I have some insight to share, and I'm adding value to you and your business. And if you're blogging just for the sake of blogging, or tweeting, just for the sake of tweeting, you may need to think about reducing your frequency, right, I think with Facebook, and the way that, you know, newsfeed algorithms work, obviously, the more people that join social media, and the more content that we all publish, the harder it's going to be for any single given piece of content to be viewed by anybody. And that's just going to continue unless you adopt paid social, or pay a little bit for native or display advertising. And that's going to be the subject of another podcast. But that's really where we're going this year and into the future with social. So this importance of content, go bigger, go home, if you've been reading what I've been publishing on LinkedIn, and I hope you'll follow me there because I'm publishing some unique content there. It's not about you know, abusing the LinkedIn publishing platform and, and, you know, blogging on a daily basis, look at the thought leaders and the influencers, they blog maybe once a month. So when you blog, make accounts, and try to create unique content for unique audiences. And I'm in my LinkedIn posts. So far, I've been very adamant about that. Don't just copy and paste what you've done elsewhere, make something unique for that audience geared towards the audience. And I think that your content marketing and social media efforts will be all the better because of that. So on the topic of content, I want to talk about something that's very, very dear to my heart. And as you create more content, and as you create great content, that content is going to be copied. Right. Now, it's interesting that Matt Cutts, a Google, I believe just announced this new tool that and I don't know the URL offhand. But if you do a search, I think you can find it or if you comment on my blog, I'll definitely let you know or asked me on Twitter. But basically, the comment was, if you see a content scraper site that appears higher than you in search results, please let us know. Now if you are adamantly watching your, you know, search results for every single blog post, I have, like several 100 already published, I cannot do that. And I don't have an SEO company that does that for me. So if you have that infrastructure, awesome. But for some small businesses out there and solo practitioners who don't have that, I want to give you some advice on on what to do to avoid that. Now, some people in the SEO world say, Hey, you have a timestamp on your on your blog, you published it first, Google will recognize that and there are no issues. But obviously, people get better and better at duping Google. So the advice I want to give you what I do, and I'm as I'm talking I just had this come up again today. Someone actually for the first time republished my unique content that I published on LinkedIn, on their Wordpress. And you know, they gave me an attribute. This comes from Neal Schaffer with a link back to my site, but it's word for word they didn't ask for my permission. So the first thing is if you're thinking of doing this don't unless you ask someone for their permission to republish your content on their website, you do not have permission. There are WordPress plugins, there are services that will republish content for you, you know, that is illegal. And if you're doing it, please stop. I'm hoping none of my listeners are doing it. But how to deal with people that do do it. And you know, the first step is people are getting savvier doing this. But I always try to create an internal backlink into every single blog post that I write, including on LinkedIn. This means that if it's copied, and if their website allows pings Now, not every website does, I am going to get pinged with something out of trackback, that's going to appear below my comment that says this content appeared somewhere else someone is using that same link that I used internally to my website to point their copy content to my website. And this is really one of the easiest things you can do to ensure that your content doesn't get copied doesn't work all the time. As I said, people have to have that ping, option open and a lot of savvy content scrapers don't. But it is one thing you can do. Another thing you can do, obviously, is to do Google Alerts. I just do Google alerts for my name and my brand names. But I mean, you could do a Google alert for the title of every blog post and see where literally where it pops up. So that's sort of another line of defense that you have really outside of that, you know, there's plugins, I think there's a plugin called a tent. If I'm not mistaken, I'm forgetting the name of it, but it's a plugin. And you know, the WordPress SEO by Yoast also has this feature where you add you add a string to your RSS feed so that if someone tries to import your RSS feed as is, they're going to import a backlink or they're going to import you know, a do not, you do not have permission to republish this content in your website, or something embarrassing like that. So that's something that you can do as well. Yeah, I think it is TYN t.com that offers a similar plugin that you can check out as well. So that's sort of another line of defense that you might have. But you know, I want to talk about the issue of once you find that it happens, what do you do, and unfortunately, just as I have told you that you shouldn't do it, and I'm assuming you don't do it, it really comes down to education. I remember having a conversation with a maximize social business contributor, and, you know, awesome person, Christy Hines who some of you may know, as being an expert on blog marketing. And, you know, she was saying in a conversation we had online, and you know, a lot of people just don't know, and they think it's okay to do it, right. And it really comes down to us as content creators and content publishers, to let people know that it's not alright, now I take a pretty aggressive stance, and I don't, you know, time is money, I don't like to waste too much time on this. And it doesn't happen all the time. But I tell you when it happens, and it's usually once or twice a month, and if that company or person has social media profiles, you know, I will leave a comment asking them to delete my content, because they violated copyright law, in essence, but I will go after them in social media, if they have a Twitter account, if they have a Google Plus account, a Facebook page, that is open territory, right? They if they, if they are involved in social media, they really need to know that this is not right. And I will say, you know, I'll tweet it out. And you know, hopefully, it's gonna teach them a lesson, that it is not okay, they're gonna think real hard. Before they do that. And you know, for they try to do that, again, some people think I go a little bit aggressive on it. Like I said, you know, if you publish content, you know, the time it takes to craft well thought content on the internet, it's not a trivial thing. And people shouldn't have the right to obviously, steal that content very, very easily. So, you know, this isn't one of the most critical things to your business, visa vie social media, but it is an issue, that is something you're going to have to deal with. And I think you should deal with it. And I think if you do that my experience has been that most people I'd say 80 to 90% of the people, they'll contact me, they'll delete it. Some will say they're sorry, you know, oh, my SEO guy did that. Sorry, who knows who really did it, right? And others will say, Hey, I gave you a backlink I'm promoting your content. But, you know, if you had asked for permission, that's one thing, but I want to promote my content on my website, right? You know, what gives you the right to promote write your own content. That's really the message that I always tell people, if you have some expertise is something to share, add value to the blogosphere, instead of just copying everybody else's. So that is my advice for the day, I really do think that you should be monitoring and taking some of the steps that I mentioned, especially if you find the contents being copied. And you know, let's all help in educating the world. And hopefully, by the end of the day, we'll be able to reduce this problem. So that's it for today, everybody. I am gearing up for Social Media Marketing World March, I believe 27th 28th in San Diego, really excited about the presentation I'm given there, which is going to be all new content based on a new book that I'm writing of how companies achieve excellence in social media. So be on the lookout for that make sure you follow the hashtag, SMM w 14, and if you're gonna be at Social Media Marketing World please make sure you tap on my shoulder and say hi. So that's it for today, everybody, as I always say, wherever you are in the world, make it a great day. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on the show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com Thanks for listening and have a great day.