I was writing up comments about a b2b tip on using linkedin to generate leads I got from marketingprofs today. I remarked as an aside that it “seemed like a lot of the gurus are drinking from the hubspot well this week.” when I dug a few clicks deeper, I saw the Aug 9 tip I received was based on a Jul 23 marketingprofs post that included a chart and some figures attributed to hubspot. in fact, the post owes more to hubspot than a pretty picture. most of the content paraphases this May 18 post “how to generate loads of emails to generate loads of leads”.
update/clarification: I deeply regret my implication (“owes more to hubspot,” “word for word”) that ms. kramer copied from the hubspot article, either verbatim or in spirit. I do not believe she or marketingprofs are guilty of plagiarism.
I have no doubt the material in the hubspot article has shown up lots in other hubspot articles. it seems odd to see it appear nearly word for word under a non-hubspot byline with no attribution. Here’s the beginning of the 9-point list in the hubspot piece:
- Give them reason to keep reading. Open your email with something compelling enough to grab the reader’s attention, and convince them it’s worth their time to continue reading. It helps to include a mind blowing statistic here, if you have one. Use a clear but interesting transition to connect that first sentence to your main offer. The connection needs to be relevant and continue to keep the readers attention.
- Have a call-to-action! Whether it’s an ebook, a blog post, a coupon, or an event page, send your readers somewhere they can get more information that will benefit them. And to track the success of that offer, be sure to use a link shortening and tracking service like bitly. This will help you gauge the type of offers that work best for your LinkedIn Group.
- Make your call-to-action compelling. It’s not enough to have a CTA — you need to convince your reader to click through! Clearly tell recipients why they should download your content, attend your event, or use your product. Don’t make them fill in the blanks — be explicit with the value they will derive from redeeming your offer. Using bulleted lists or other formatting devices to call out these points will help you make your case.
- Pose a question about the offer. The email you send will be linked in a featured discussion on the LinkedIn Group (more on this in a minute). That means you need to give them a reason to engage with the post that appears.
here’s the marketingprofs list of tips for getting the most out of linkedin announcements:
- Ditch the default subject line. Just as you wouldn’t send a default LinkedIn invitation to connect with someone (and if you do, stop it!), you don’t want to send an announcement with the standard subject line. Instead, channel your inner email marketer to write a descriptive and compelling subject line that will make recipients want to open the message.
- Catch their attention. Make no mistake; this is an ad campaign. Treat your copy in your email marketing efforts as you do in any other campaign. As you start your message, make sure the opening lines are interesting enough to grab—and keep—a reader’s attention. This is a great place for stats—not only can they present a compelling case in a short amount of space, but they can also help readers visualize a particular topic or subject matter, which will help pique their interest.
- Include a call to action. I’m guessing you’re contacting fellow group members because you want them to take some sort of action, right? Make sure you include that call to action in your message, whether it’s linking to an external piece of content, providing an offer or coupon or referring to a special event or landing page. By having a specific destination and using a link tracking service like Bit.ly, you can monitor the success of your lead generation campaign and use that information to refine future messages and initiatives.
- Ask a question. All LinkedIn Announcements will also appear as featured discussions in that particular group, so it’s a good idea to pose a question about the message to prompt people to not only click through to the message content, but also spark dialogue within the LinkedIn group.
to complicate the issue further, marketingprofs repurposed their own article as this b2b tip I received today:
the new post again mentions “data from hubspot” but provides no mention of the hubspot content that clearly informs the july article and this subsequent piece. what are your thoughts on content “repurposing”? is it different when it’s done by established industry players rather than some freelancer putting out content as his or her own?
Pingback: attribution: if you didn't write it, cite it - the qualified yes
Hi Todd — I took your post here and your comments on Twitter quite seriously, and to be honest they bothered me for two reasons:
1) Because I know and respect Shelly as a marketer and content contributor. She knows her stuff, and I have tremendous admiration for what she’s built, which is why we feel lucky to have her speaking and writing on behalf of MarketingProfs.
And 2) Because the editors at MarketingProfs and I work very hard to ensure that our content is truly valuable and top-shelf. This is critical for us, in an era when everyone with access to WordPress is also a publisher. Our staff editors are dedicated and talented and they do an amazing job. So any public criticism — even implied — of our editorial process bothers me, especially (as Erika suggests) when there was no effort to contact me with a specific issue.
I’m both accessible and visible on social channels or private channels, too. My email address is listed in every issue of MarketingProfs Today, our daily newsletter. I would’ve welcomed a clarifying conversation before taking this issue up on a blog, Twitter and G+… with the implication on those channels immediately being that we acted in an untoward manner, or that Hubspot and MarketingProfs (or Mike Volpe and me?) are somehow in competition. We are partners on a lot of things, friends here in Boston, and a lot of things… but not competitors. The set-up felt inflammatory.
Does MarketingProfs hit it out of the park every time? Of course not. We’re human beings. But at the same time, I don’t think there was a real error here. And I don’t say this lightly — I spent a fair amount of time yesterday going over all the posts you call out here, talking to Shelly, talking to our editors, and trying to view it with a fresh, unbiased eye. The only thing: Maybe we could have linked to the specific URL for the Hubspot research — vs. Hubspot generally? Maybe. But that’s pretty small potatoes.
Thanks for letting me clarify things here.
Ann Handley
Chief Content Officer
@MarketingProfs
Pingback: ch-ch-changes* (toward authorial transparency) | btrandolph.com « the qualified yesthe qualified yes
as Shelly notes in her comment, I do “dance around” the p word in my post. to clarify, I do not think she was guilty of plagiarism in her post. authors, good and bad alike, have been rehashing topics since charcoal was first applied to rock (or bark, or whatever). social media has provided a set of new topics, but the set is finite. Shelly does not quote the earlier article verbatim in her post. I do believe she was hasty and failed to bring original insights to the topic. I read a lot of her stuff on marketingprofs and elsewhere and enjoy it.
I think this was a blip, but it does serve as a cautionary tale for writers in general and writers who make their living providing information and insights to others in particular.
hi Shelly, and thanks for your reply. first, let me apologize if my post sounded like a hubspot puff piece. I admire and learn a lot from all of you out there – in this instance it happened to go one way, but it could have as easily been the reverse. as I said in my post, the whole thing came up when I received a B2B tip from marketingprofs in my email yesterday. I was not familiar with the Announcements feature and since the tip page (link in my post) didn’t provide more info, I googled. Your post came up, as did Anum’s. I wrote up the post on my posterous blog (http://inapropos.posterous.com/generate-leads-with-linkedin-announcements-ma). I was struck by the similarity between your writeup and hers. The quoted section was just one example, and perhaps not the best one to use. As you (and Ann Handley, who also replied via Twitter) point out, that particular advice is pretty generic, so it is not surprising to find similarities.
to your point regarding new developments, I totally understand that when there’s news, coverage of that news will be similar across competing media. In this case, however, I do not think that argument is valid. I don’t know when LinkedIn introduced the announcement email feature for groups, but the writeup in their help section dates from May 2011. Anum’s post on the hubspot blog appeared a year later. your original post appeared in July. Is it possible you wrote your piece not knowing that hubspot (and yes, probably a million other posters) had already covered the same information? Of course. The data you cite relates only to linkedin’s general effectiveness as a lead generation tool, not specifically to the announcements feature.
a minor point: you state that the hubspot data was linked. in fact, the chart is not linked to the source, and the text link is to the hubspot site only and not to the article or resource about the data in question.
is it good advice? yes, it is. all I’m saying is that had I been writing about using linkedin announcements as a lead generation tool, i would have done what I did and googled. I would have read what others had already written. and maybe I would have seen an aspect those others had not covered that i felt would be useful. or maybe i would have shrugged and looked for a new topic.
I’m not particularly seeing the problem. HubSpot is mentioned in the post’s introduction and regardless, when big changes like this come onto the scene for anything, from Apple to lead paint, writers latch on to the topics.
What I *would* like to ask is why didn’t you take this up with MarketingProfs before writing a post about it? Seems to me that would have been the first logical direction instead of blasting them. They’re one of the most ethical, honest, and forthright sites around these days. I’m sure Ann would have welcomed a conversation with you.
Also: you can’t “repurpose” something since you can’t “purpose” it in the first place.
Finally: if you’re so against the HubSpot Kool-Aid, why that nice Website Grader icon at the bottom of your site?
thanks for the reply, Erika. I was clear in my reply to Shelly that I don’t love (or hate!) hubspot. My issue was that they were mentioned in connection with data and a pretty chart about linkedin and not at all in connection with the topic of the post, using linkedin announcements for lead generation. I get a lot of good insights from marketingprofs, too, along with a bunch of other sites for that matter.
note I say insights. information, or more accurately data, is different. for example, the marketingprofs b2b tip I received summarized Shelly’s post but failed to include a definition of linkedin announcements, with which I was not familiar. I looked up that information on the linkedin site. the insight is the coaching on what to do with the information. The insights I received from Shelly’s article were not identical to those in the hubspot article, but they didn’t cover any new ground. I wouldn’t ask columbus to document his discovery of america, and it was certainly new to him. he just wasn’t the first one there. in the age of nearly instant access to information, it is the content creator’s responsibility to do at least cursory investigation to see who has stepped on that same beach before.
I suspect both of you think I should have paid more attention to the “don’t be a douche” section of her post, and I do feel a bit silly now. all I am asking is to do some basic checking, especially when, as in this case, the “news” is not very new. and I think we’re stuck with repurpose – I have the same issue with impact as a verb, but once it’s in the big book, I think we’re just left to wince.
Hey Todd,
As the author of the MProfs piece you’re concerned with, I appreciate your concerns. In fact I just published a piece on plagiarism on the blog and am a pretty vocal supporter of protecting your content. And, while you’re not suggesting plagiarism out loud, you’re certainly dancing around it.
I write a lot. About a lot of things that are happening in the online space. So does the team at HubSpot and a host of other bloggers who spend their professional careers providing services and solutions to clients who need them. And when news breaks about a change in something that might impact clients or readers, we all write about it. And usually pretty quickly.
With regard to this particular post, I can assure you that HubSpot is not the only person paying attention to changes happening on LinkedIn. My team and I do a ton of corporate speaking and training of teams on how to use LinkedIn for new business development and for recruiting. As such, because it’s well, our livelihood, the minute there’s a change with regard to the services available via LinkedIn or any upgrades to their functionality, it’s a big deal to me and to my team. And to our clients.
This particular update to LinkedIn functionality– it isn’t rocket surgery. It’s the basic fundamentals of email marketing – only using LinkedIn groups as your target audience. To our way of thinking (and certainly not exclusive to us) there are only so many different ways to discuss the basics of email marketing — and my way is the four ways listed above. The fact that HubSpot’s article mentioned those same issues (as probably do a million other posts out there), doesn’t mean a line was crossed and attribution wasn’t made. In fact, when HubSpot was mentioned here, and their data used, it was absolutely linked–as always.
To your final point about drinking HubSpot Koolaid, HubSpot isn’t by any means the Holy Grail of anything. Especially for us. But in this particular instance, the data to which we referred in this post was exceptionally relevant. And, we believe a good source.
I can assure you that this content is the result of my thoughts in my words on a timely and relevant functionality update on a social network that’s very important to both clients and readers alike. Which is typically the goal of all bloggers and marketing/social media pros who are working to serve their clients and audiences via the content they produce for their blogs or blogs to which they contribute.
Shelly Kramer
@shellykramer