"Attribution" Is A Long Word Used By Small People
If ever there was a misleading headline....
The title is actually a quote I heard recently and thought this post seems as good a place to use it as any. Yes the person was being a douche-bag but they had a point. Kinda. So... whilst my Dogbert tweet continues to take on a life of it's own, the same thing seems to have happened to one of my friends. I few emails and DM's later and I'm in the middle of a feisty five person debate about attribution...
Dogbert on big data consulting and dashboards ~ pic.twitter.com/MCd5rPH8vF
â Jeremy âď¸ (@jeremywaite)
The backlash on #MyNYPD campaign is another great example of completely misunderstanding social & public perception ~ pic.twitter.com/gbLBafEh3W
â Jack Ashman (@Jack_Ashman)
What both of us did was share something that we knew would add value to our communities on twitter, but we also did it quickly, as part of a wider conversion for fun. No commercial intent. No agenda or ulterior motive. Just sharing a cool piece of content that neither of us produced.
I bring this up because I was taken to task by someone on Twitter upset that my tweet had travelled so far, and they felt that I wasn't crediting the author. As much as I don't pay too much attention to follower counts, I did raise an eyebrow when I noticed that Alex had 205,000 followers ~ and so thought it was worth a deeper conversation.Â
#PSA: Please credit creator & link: http://t.co/bvEFpJZVN3 to sources of comics & photos you tweet. cc @jeremywaite pic.twitter.com/FwBGtRxXAc
â Alex Howard (@digiphile)
Coming back to my friend, Jack shared a killer quote from Unmarketing's Scott Stratten which had been transformed into a clever image. What he had no idea about was that I actually created that image. He'd seen it in many presentations and liked it enough to want to share it with his followers.
"People share emotions, they don't share facts".
And I think this raises a couple of interesting points. Both pieces of content credited their respective authors (Scott Stratten and Scott Adams), but their was a disconnect between the publisher and the person who was responsible for promoting it. I would argue that none of this matters because as social marketers, both Jack and I just wanted to share something cool with the people who take notice of our stuff. We weren't passing off anything as our own or intentionally ignoring the original author.
Where this gets interesting though is around the debate that brands have on the same issue. Their social content is created with commercial intent. It may be with a long term view that converts somewhere much further downstream, but for that reason attribution is very important. But my point is that attribution (tying content back to the original author) and tracking (tying content back to the original publisher) are two entirely different things.
It's a small distinction that some brands get confused about. Yes of course you should be tagging your content (or appending a custom url in order to track it's performance in your analytics tool of choice), but getting hung up on permissions means that some great content never gets shared or sees the light of day. I'm not saying you should beg forgiveness instead of asking permission, but I believe if you understand your audience well enough, they will always respect your intent.
Jack and I understand that GREAT content does one of 6 things;
My tweet was close to the truth for many marketers and challenged them to have a conversation about exactly what value dashboards provide. Jack shared a great quote that inspired and informed social marketers about what social media should be used for.Â
Both of us shared links quickly (knowing a name was credited in the image) knowing that the right message, posted at the right time, would resonate well if targeted to the right audience (in our cases ~ our twitter followers). We could do this because we understood our audiences and we were prepared to add value to a conversation - without any commercial intent or desire to ego-surf or grow our own personal social networks.
In Tom Standage's brilliant book, Social Media, The First 2,000 Years - he talks a lot about community and ancient civilisations using social media and creating sharable content. One such group were the early Christians who used a word called agape. It's actually one of the only words in the Greek language that hasn't been translated into English, and also the only word for love that doesn't have any double meaning.
I love you means lots of different things to lots of different people (mum, dad, brother, friend, girlfriend, wife) it can also be applied to an object. Agape on the other hand only means one thing, "love that wants nothing in return". I mention this only because it's that kind of intent that creates viral content. Something put out into a community that doesn't expect anything in return. But for that very reason, some kind of digital karma often rewards a publishers genuine intentions with lots of eyeballs.
Audiences aren't stupid. They can usually recognise commercial content, no matter how well it is disguised. What we need is more digital marketers who genuinely want to add value to the communities that their organisation live in. This, by the way, is the main reason that digital marketing tools exist - in order to make sure that all content, shared at scale across many audiences, countries and languages - can be tracked, monitored and analysed properly, in order to better understand the way that people behave online. That in turn helps to create better content and provide better experiences for everyone.
Secret to content marketing: Audience first. Commercial intent second.
And that's the difference between traditional marketing and good content driven digital marketing. The best digital marketing has an element of 'agape'. Traditional marketing on the other hand is driven by commercial considerations first and audience second. (Not all traditional marketing, but most of it).
If you're interested in the wider debate around attribution and crediting the source of any cool stuff you share ~ Austin Kleon's new book "Show your Work" is a short and playful little read, but also one of the most thought provoking book I've read in a while. I think you'll enjoy it.
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