Content Marketing Matters
While some folks think that content marketing matters only to large B2B companies or media outlets, small business owners and personal brand builders alike understand that content marketing falls under the umbrella of marketing your personal brand.
Write and share a blog post on Vunela or LinkedIn? That’s using content marketing to establish your credibility or expertise. Write a white paper to share the steps you took to help a client change industries? It becomes content marketing when you offer a free copy of the white paper to visitors to your website when they sign up for your newsletter.
I wanted to write about this because while working with new clients in 2017 the issues around sharing content and using content marketing to promote a personal or small biz brand frequently came up. And then, unfortunately, as the year went on I had a few of these folks complain about seeing strikingly similar content pop up in some unexpected places, such as the website of a competitor.
I had to explain that since publishing my book at the end of 2009 and becoming an active speaker, media guest, and blogger, I receive Google Alerts highlighting my content in use elsewhere on a fairly regular basis. The reality is that as more people decide to publish to get noticed, the higher the likelihood of people appropriating your content.
For example, if you write books, articles, and blog posts and describe an aspect of your business or knowledge base with a certain flair based on your years on Wall Street, and then you see a blog post on LinkedIn where a person with a background in forensic accounting writes using terminology you know is unique to the way you often describe stock trading, odds are very good that when they decided to write a blog post about the upcoming tax changes, you should have been cited as the source of this particular phraseology.
Therefore, due to the frequency of these type of complaints, and all the plagiarizing I have personally experienced, I wanted to share this excellent explainer video from the geniuses at Common Craft because while we can’t police the entire Internet, each of us can at least try to avoid being the perpetrator of such bad behavior.
Two LinkedIn Privacy Matters
1) Did you know that LinkedIn has recently made it possible for your Connections (yes, all 5,000 of them!) to see when you are actually on the platform (desktop or mobile)? It’s true! A few months ago they quietly added and turned on this feature.
While I can think of many reasons why this particular new feature might prove helpful to some overly-aggressive salespeople, it could also be a nightmare for employed job seekers or many of the “promiscuous linkers” out there who have been less than discerning about expanding their networking on the platform.
What you also might not have known is that whenever LinkedIn has a new feature or changes an existing one, they tend to default the settings to be in their favor and not have your privacy concerns in mind. More…(read the rest and how to turn this off in this post).
2) Last year, they announced Resume Assistant, which integrates content from LinkedIn directly into Microsoft Word claiming it will enable you to craft a better resume. Many people are NOT happy about this appropriation of their profile content by Microsoft but the good news is you can also turn this off in LinkedIn’s Settings + Privacy (see image below).
If you have any content marketing questions or would like my help elevating your profile and presence on LinkedIn, please contact me via this handy form.