Plagiarism Plagues The Internet & The Trades

Imagine someone breaking into your company, copying every ad you've paid to have created, every management document you've authored, every direct mail letter you've penned, every form that's unique to your company, your website design, and every special nuance about your business. Then, the guy who broke into your business turns around and presents your service agreement, your advertising, and your documents to your customers... as his.

Even if you would freely share all of your operations and methods with the guy, it's unnerving to see him market and sell your programs as his work product. This is plagiarism and it's a HUGE problem today.

Plagiarism is too clinical a term. Face it. This is theft, pure and simple, and its perpetrators are crooks.

If it happened to you, there's a chance you might go nuclear. You might send the lawyers after the culprit, regardless of the costs. But what if it happened to a friend or a peer? All you can do is stand by, helpless to assist and uncertain how much to say for fear of reverse litigation.

Tina at The English Muse blog writes...

There's something terrible happening in our beautiful corner of the Internet and I cannot stay silent about it any longer. In the past two months, two of my dear blogger friends have been ripped off. Both of them had their templates stolen. Both of them had their content stolen. One of them had her blog name stolen! (I've even heard about another woman who put a right-click lock on her site to stop the thieves!) This is crazy!

There needs to be a strong code of conduct -- or a copyright lawyer who willing to fight for bloggers who want to protect their content and identities. How can we call ourselves "inspiration bloggers" when we're stealing inspiration from our colleagues? Or even from our friends?

I understand Tina's position entirely. Plagiarism is a plague on the Internet, including the service trades. Unfortunately, plagiarists often get away with it when the pursuit of the plagiarist is expensive and the payoff is slim.


On Guard In Your Business

When we hire outside copywriters at the Service Roundtable, we always check key phrases of their work products with Google. If we find a copywriter has copied the copy - and we have - that's it. We won't use the work and refuse to hire the copywriter again. I won't trust a proven thief or assume the liability of using stolen material.

I've run across ad agencies executives who wrote articles where key passages or even the entire article was copied from other people. The agency executive, simply changed the author's name. This is not someone I would trust for advice, let alone to present my business's image to the world.

Sadly, plagiarism also affects the service trades. Frankly, contractors are guilty of their share of plagiarism though the worst offenders usually operate out of ignorance. It's not an excuse, but at least their motives aren't larcenous. Still, ignorant or not, these contractors are exposing themselves to legal liability.

Clouding the issue is the fact that some copyright owners don't care about plagiarism, don't bother to enforce their rights if they do care, or are simply not around any longer. I've created material where the copyright was assigned to another legal entity as part of a work product and the legal entity has since moved on or disappeared. There's no one to turn to for permission.

Some contractors rely on third parties to provide them with original material. Like the lazy copywriter who plagiarizes, some third parties are lazy and plagiarize with purpose. The use of plagiarized material, unwitting or not, is no less of a risk.

Unfortunately, it's incumbent on the business owner to check intellectual property suppliers. In short, be on guard.

Would You Buy A Webinar From This Man?

Through the years I’ve participated in a number of webinars. One of the first occasions was a webinar sponsored by a manufacturer. In addition to a huge network of distributors, the manufacturer maintained a large database of contractors. The webinar was promoted to all of them.

Personally, I have a hard time watching a webinar. I’m a little too A-D-D to sit still during voice-over-PowerPoint slides, especially if the speaker is slow and methodical.

Arrgh. Waterboard me. Pull out my fingernails one by one. Just don’t make me sit through another boring, tedious, monotonous, dry, dull, voice-over-PowerPoint presentation.

People tell me I’m not very patient about these things. Well, I have to do something else while the webinar is going on. Typically, this means flipping back and forth between the webinar in my web browser and another application.

Because webinars are attended at the desktop, the tendency is to continue working until the instant the webinar starts. As a result I’m usually in the middle of something when it’s webinar time. Unless the subject or speaker is especially compelling, I don’t stop what I’m doing and by the time I finish, the webinar is also finished. I’ve missed a lot of webinars this way.

If I’m this way, I figure most contractors are as bad, if not worse. They’re going to have trouble sitting through a webinar and are always in the middle of something else, whether it’s at the office or in the field. Thus, out of the thousands of invitations to the manufacturer’s webinar, I estimated no more than a couple of hundred might actually attend the webinar featuring moi.

It wasn’t even a couple of dozen.

This probably means I’m not a very compelling draw. Of course, I’m not alone. I talked with a number of organizations about webinars. Attendance is usually light. This should be expected. Consider the following from the eMarketing^2 website…

Let’s say you have a database of 5,000 subscribers, you send them 1 invitation and a response rate of 2% - Let’s apply the formula:

5000 subscribers x 1 invitation = 5,000 contacts

5,000 contacts x .02 response rate = 100 registrants

100 registrants x .4 attendance ratio = 40 attendees

Is a 2% response rate reasonable? Frankly, I think it’s on the high side. For highly technical subjects plus a strong customer list and an audience in the computer field, MarketCapture’s Eran Livneh reports response rates has high as 5%. Howard Sewell of Connect Direct notes that 0.5% is more typical (Source).

The 40% attendance rate is on par with the numbers claimed by webinar expert Ken Molay and that webinar hosts have reported to me, though greater than the Web Conferencing Council’s figure of 25%. For contractors, it's probably reasonable to expect between 30% and 50% of the individuals who register will actually attend.

So in theory, how many contractors could anyone get to attend a webinar?

If we include plumbing and HVAC, there are approximately 85,000 contractors with a payroll. Another 110,000 are sole proprietorships or partnerships without a payroll. If we round to 200,000 companies and contact ALL of them by email with the 0.5% response rate and the 40% attendance rate, we can expect an attendance of 400.

200,000 x 0.5% x 40% = 400
At a 2% response rate, attendance would be 1,600.

These numbers explain why most industry webinars are lightly attended. The starting pool of contractors is simply too small. No one has the email addresses to reach all 200,000 companies. Even if someone did, it’s tough to get contractors to sit still in front of a computer screen at a scheduled time. Thus, a host is doing well to get 50 to 100 people to attend a non-technical webinar.

So how come I keep seeing ads and invitations to webinars that first, claim that space is limited and second, proclaim the last webinar was attended by three to five thousand people?

Frankly, I doubt the veracity of anyone making such claims. Why make them? Why not simply stress the content, instead of making purported fabrications about the audience size and Internet space limitations?

Omit the audience and capacity limitation claims and the webinar is no less attractive. So why interject them? Why lie when you don’t have to? Is it because some people can’t help themselves?

If I believe someone is lying to me to get me to attend a webinar, I’ve got to wonder, how much honesty can I expect within the webinar? Apparently not much. Certainly not enough for me to give up 30 minutes of my life to sit in front of a computer screen listening to another boring, tedious, monotonous, dry, dull voice-over-PowerPoint presentation.



No wonder people hate and distrust marketers.

(c) 2009 Matt Michel