Social Media Can Come Back to Bite You

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that many of things you do on the internet can be seen by anyone. And whether you want it to or not, it may live on in infamy. So you want to be extra careful when you represent your company in social media. What you do can affect how people perceive you.

A blogger I know recently found her content on another site. It appears that it was scraped off of her RSS feed. She tried contacting the site via e-mail, asking that they remove her content. When she received no response, she went to Twitter to ask if anyone else had gotten their content scraped by this company.

What happened next could have been prevented by just taking some time to compose a professional and measured company response.

The company responded saying that she was bashing them and that they weren’t scraping her content. Of course, then the blogger wondered how they have her exact posts from her web site? Part of the problem was that the blogger’s content was not properly attributed or linked back to her site. How can a company claim to drive traffic to a writer if there are no links to the original work?

The conversation went downhill from there. The company complained that people were bashing them and calling the bloggers (at this point, more than one blogger was complaining) unreasonable. Instead of getting defensive, the company should have immediately complied with the request and then attempted to give more information about their business model.

And if you’re trying to drive traffic from your site to someone else’s, it helps if you actually link a short quote back to the original author. Unless someone releases their copyright, like Leo Babauta at Zen Habits, you should be very careful about how much content you reprint. Fair use is one thing, but reprinting an entire post without permission is something entirely different.

This back and forth on Twitter resulted in the blogger writing an entire post about the situation, drawing even further attention to what she considered a social media failure. Situations like this are easily preventable by just taking a moment and thinking about your best response. Don’t be that type of social media example.

image: Newscom