Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Part IVPublishing Rules

Many companies have adopted the we're-all-publishers-now mantra—but without a clear understanding of the ground rules of publishing.

No matter what kind of content marketers are charged with creating, they can learn much from the publishing world—in particular from journalism. Thinking like a publisher is simply not enough; you also need to act like one.

Not long ago I noticed that a company had co-opted some content that we at MarketingProfs had created; the word thieves had scrubbed it free of our branding and other identifiers, and then passed it off as their own.

That sort of thing happens all the time on the Web, I know: bots constantly scrape content and republish it elsewhere with no regard for copyright or author.

But this situation felt a little different to me, because the piece that was lifted was something our team was particularly proud of: we had invested long hours in creating what we thought was nothing short of brilliant (and, incidentally, it also drove business effectively for us). In other words, the theft felt more like an ethical violation than straightforward copyright infringement. And it felt more personal because it was the theft of an idea and execution that we had spent long hours honing—rather than just a cut-and-paste of a blog post, say.

Content creation and social media are an opportunity for brands…a huge one, in fact. But, ...