Dear Content Marketers: Please Steal Better
Using existing content to create something better
On a sunny California afternoon in December 1979, Steve Jobs was making his way around Xerox PARC, moments away from executing one of the greatest heists in tech history.
He was shown various projects, including the Smalltalk-80 object-oriented programming environment, networking initiatives, and most importantly, a mouse-driven graphical user interface.
An engineer named Larry Tesler was running the demonstration, guiding the mouse across the GUI, deftly opening and closing window, and executing programs. As he clicked, Steve began to get more and more excited. Several minutes into the demonstration, he made a decision: he was going to steal Xerox’s idea. A few months later, apple rolled out a personal computer, with a more polished GUI, and a more functional and reliable mouse, and the personal computing world was changed forever.
Stealing vs. Stealing
Now when I say “steal” I think it’s important to note that I’m not accusing Steve Jobs of hamburglar-esque activities (the Hamburglar is a fictional McDonalds character that presumably spent his days stealing 99 cent hamburgers out of the mouths of American children for some nefarious fast food agenda.) That type of stealing is always going to be wrong. If you are taking something that doesn’t belong to you, and you are the only party benefiting from it, shame on you, give it back. I see what Steve Job’s did that day in 1979 as something more. Something content marketers can aspire to.
If you were to set Xerox’s mouse and Apples mouse side by side, you would see two similar, yet very different products. Sure the concept is the same, but Apple’s mouse was cheaper to build, more reliable, worked on virtually any surface, and sported one easy button, not three. Sure the idea was not Apple’s but the idea was used to create and innovation. And that makes all the difference.
Stop the Content Theft
I see content marketers steal ideas every day. The subjects of blog posts are recycled over and over again, clever newsjacking of real-time events is duplicated, popular infographics are recreated in cheaper, less attractive forms. This form of stealing ideas has the potential to be a Job’s-esque opportunity to innovate and improve on existing ideas, delivering better content to consumers and evolving, not copying, the ideas of fellow content marketers. But content marketers are blowing this opportunity. They’re stealing ideas in the worst possible way.
If you search Google for “writing the perfect blog post” there are 75,200,000 results at the time I’m writing this article. 75 Million! And giving a brief skim to the first page of results, you notice that each one of these articles is more or less exactly the same. “Create a great title.” Use Sub-heads and bullets.” “End with a call to action.” This content is being regurgitated over and over again, not improved upon.
Writers aren’t building a better mousetrap, they’re giving us an infestation of mousetraps.
And it’s such a waste. The rise of content marketing has spilled so many ideas into the public domain, there is more opportunity to innovate, more ideas to take and run with, than ever before. You have so much inspiration to create something yourself, or build on top of an existing idea, that you should never be satisfied with just rewriting somebody else’s work. Your audience certainly never will be.
So if you want to steal like Steve Jobs a not the Hamburgler, here are my 3 tips for stealing better.
1. Add something to the idea
Design something better. Explain something clearer. Take a blog post you love and make it visual. Take an idea even further. The options for you to add something to an idea are literally limitless. Find the areas where you can improve on the pieces of content you already love. You’ll find this frees you from the self-imposed pressure to be 100% original (an unrealistic goal to begin with) and lets you see content ideas everywhere. It’s an incredibly liberating feeling.
2. Credit where you can
If you can track an idea to the original source, give them a hat tip when you publish. While this seems like it might be inviting an argument, it’s a good test of if you are stealing right. Your content should move the original publishers idea so far forward, that it would be difficult for them to argue that they deserve all the credit. If you think they can point at it and say “hey, that’s mine!” you’re probably just straight up stealing. This is also a great way to open the door to collaboration, cross-promotion, and content partnerships.
3. If you can’t make it better, curate it
For awhile, everyone was determined to create their own content instead of curate. This makes little sense as your audience only cares that you are getting them the best comment and if somebody has created something that you yourself cannot improve on, why would you degrade the idea by trying? Curate and give a hat tip. Everyone’s happy.
What do think about the stealing and innovating of ideas in content marketing? Let me know!
