Plagiarism on the High Seas

More and more companies are finding the value in informational advertising. Giving away information to the world. This has worked well as it tends to develop confidence in potential clients in your companies expert status. Positioning your company or in the case of a consultant in this way is truly a valuable strategy to enhance brand.

Many professional writers who write content for companies complain that less ethical and lower cost writers lift much of their material from the Internet; why? Well perhaps it starts with school where kids in HS and College cheat off each other and go to the Internet for term papers, reports and steal or buy completed works. One professional writer stated that you get what you pay for and if you hire someone to write for you for minimum wage there are a good chance that you will have problematic issues. Boy do I agree with that.

I can remember before I retired hiring a staff, as well as trading a few of our franchisees, to help with research. We; myself and the researchers would power thru trade journals, websites, competition’s brochures, anything we could find to come up with ideas or borrow them from other industries and modify them to fit. One of our Alpha research team members, who we paid $3,000 per month to do research, copied some articles verbatim from a competitor. These articles ended up going out to our team members as ideas, yet they were copied verbatim. That was not the real problem as no one made mention of it or even noticed. Had I known we would have simply copied the magazine and sent out the pages and given credit to the actual author of the articles and their source.

The real problem came when we later used those articles as informational advice to our industry. Ah, so we get a nasty letter and email from the very competitor who wrote them. I defended the work as authentic until the competitor not only showed me his writing, but a copy of the magazine it appeared in, which pre-dated our Alpha Researchers use of them. I defended our team member to the end, almost accusing the competitor from stealing the work from us. Turns out he was right and I was wronged.

From that time forward I always checked anything our research team wrote up and read it and added knowledge to it and completely re-wrote the idea adding any and all personal knowledge I could come up with. After that incident; I questioned the sources and asked for all the back up materials. The fellow who worked for us was a class act, good man, never even suspected it. How embarrassing indeed.

If you are going to hire a writer or ghost writer, hire a good one. We have a problem with ethics in our nation. It seems the average person will lie to you to save $2.00; that is the average; pretty pathetic indeed. Those who pay others to write their articles should hire only professionals and expect to encounter problems if you don't. Although you should be writing your own articles if you are able; some lessons are hard to learn, if you are smart you will learn from such experiences of others and not get burned. Think on this.

Lance Winslow

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