The Trade-Off for Free

Besides this blog, I also write a technology-focused blog for my company. We typically get about 20,000 visits/month, so it does a decent job of sharing information with our partners/customers and creates some interesting conversations over on our community sites. One of the responsibility areas for my group is to create content for our sales team and distribution partners to enhance the sales process. This includes blogs, demo videos, whitepapers, presentations, online tools, podcasts, etc. In almost all cases, we publish all of this content into public areas and encourage its reuse. It's one of the only ways my small group can scale to the thousands of people selling our products.

But as I've experienced on this blog before, we occasionally have our content reused in an inappropriate way. In a recent case, a partner had reused the content (which is fine), but had introduced a bunch of typos and grammatical errors in their version. So not only did it make them look amateurish, but it reflected poorly on the source (my company's blog). They also attempted to claim credit (without attribution) for some video content that we created and they pulled off YouTube.

Not long ago, this would have raised red-flags for Legal and PR/Branding departments. But in today's age, with the free-flow of information being so available (and mostly free!!), individuals and companies need to rethink how they will deal with this reuse.

• What was the cost of creating the original content? Is it worth a fight to protect that cost? In my case (both company & personal), the cost was almost zero (other than a minutes of my time), so it's probably not worth a fight.
• Did the reuse allow the content/message to spread more virally than it might have otherwise? If the answer is yes, and the message is more important than the attribution, then it's probably not worth a fight.
• Did the reuse create an opportunity to forge a stronger relationship with the re-user? In my personal case it didn't, but on the company side it allowed us to have a conversation with a new partner and help them better tailor a message around their strengths, while helping them lower their costs by reusing some of our content.

Now this equation doesn't always work out well, as this Washington Post article highlights for the media industry. But while the media industry complains about the evils of the digital world, the information (from wherever) is getting spread more than ever. So it really should make people question what is important in how information is shared and try and optimize around those areas. In my case it is primarily about digital learning and building my personal brand (both blogs) and driving greater sales (work blog), so reuse is not that much of a concern. If I had revenue streams associated with the work, then it would introduce a whole different set of questions. I don't think the media industry has started asking those new questions yet, as they are too caught up in demanding people play by their old rules. But eventually someone that has to tie revenue to content will ask new questions and maybe their will figure out a new model to create value. The questions and answers are out there, they just need people with a new/different focus to ask them.

Understanding (and misunderstanding) how to use Digital Media

One of the more interesting aspects of the latter stages of an MBA program is that you spend less time focused on the classroom details and more time discussing and applying them to elements of your life. You find yourself looking at even the smallest interaction as an opportunity to analyze and seek improvement. Here's an example from a recent interaction with my roommate from the China trip, Gregg Lewis.

Gregg and his wife work regionally out of Roanoke, VA. He has won national awards for his architectural work, and been recognized internationally for his efforts to push the Cradle to Cradle concept of environmentally sustainable design. Gregg's passion for combining great architecture with eco-friendly sustainability are the foundation for his long term goals to raise awareness of the challenges ahead, and drive the overall building industry to be more responsible.

Over the weekend, I received an email from Gregg saying, "hey - wrote this opinion piece for the Roanoke Times - it'll be published this week." The piece ran on Monday. Overall it was well written and provides some good connectedness between the ideas being fostered by several well known individuals. My comments back to him had little to do with the content and almost everything to do with how he planned to amplify this message.

1. Is the Roanoke Times offering you a regular column to discuss aspects of environmental issues?
2. How else do you plan to get this message out to more people?

We had some follow-up discussions about basic things like Blogging, Twitter and other ways to use low-cost digital media outlets to amplify his message and generate some new conversations with people from around the world with similar interests. For now, those are on hold and we'll see if he's willing to put in some time to cultivate those communities.

This afternoon, I finally got around to looking at the piece on the Roanoke Times website. My first search for "Gregg Lewis" turned up this counter-point piece. Opinions aside, it highlights all the reasons the newspaper industry is going out-of-business and clearly doesn't understand the new world we live in. I'll just highlight a few points:

• This is a digital piece of information. It is a counter-point piece. But yet it has no URL linkage to the original piece. It forces the reader to search for it, with marginal chance for finding it.
• It provides no URL linkage to the associated articles. One again, the reader has no easy way to add breadth to the piece they are consuming.
• It provides no mechanism for the reader to comment on the articles. How does the Roanoke Times plan to gather feedback from their customers on whether or not this content is interesting to them? Wouldn't this be helpful to them to better target advertisers? Might their readers enjoy the ability to be part of the discussion?
• It doesn't allow the readers to communicate back to the author (email address, Twitter account??), essentially making this a one-way conversation in a world where two-way or asynchronous conversations rule the day.
• It hides easy linkage (see "Share it" button at top, instead of icons) to share the piece with other users or services (Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, etc..). Are they only interested in readers that manually navigate to this page? Do they have no interest in free distribution and possibly national or international readers?

So here we have a global message, one that needs discussions and ideas from many sides to make progress, and the institution publishing the message doesn't seem to understand the fundamentals of facilitating the conversation. They are stuck in a world of local readers, local writers, and paperboys with papers slung over their shoulders in a canvas bag for early morning delivery. They have never been in the conversation business, so it's not surprising that they don't understand even cocktail-party basics.

I hope that my friend's message and future work is able to better take advantage of the digital economy that could allow it to grow and expand. I'm more than willing to help share my experiences.