I was struck today by a small incident on Twitter. A teacher who writes, Tom Bennett (@tombennett71) discovered that a blog had copied a piece he'd written for the TES site, without permission.
He queried this, and received this response:
and then, this:
I was clearly not alone in thinking that a poor response. It attracted a great deal of adverse comment and ridicule on Twitter, all featuring the name of the offending organisation. I have only included the first few here. In short, a PR disaster.
I don't think Tom's approach was unreasonable, but even if it had been, organisations are really expected to handle things in a more professional way than that.
Whilst I have no pretensions to expertise in PR, it did lead me to formulate Scott's Law (I always wanted to have a Law!) which I will now share with the world:
As well as furnishing me with a Law (which may be my single biggest contribution to human happiness and well-being), this incident also brought back memories.
Some years ago, I wrote a piece for Personnel Management magazine. I was surprised to find it turn up (uncredited) as a handout in a training course used by one of my client organisations. When I raised it with them, they were extremely apologetic: the course (as I knew, in fact) had been written for them by one of the large HR consultancies. In fact, the reason I came across the handout was that my client had asked me to re-write the course, as it was very poorly put together. So I was quietly delighted to point out not only that I wrote better material than the expensive London consultancy, but also that they plagiarised my stuff to add quality to theirs...
In fairness, the consultancy were also very apologetic: which is why, I suppose, I didn't formulate Scott's Law then. But better late than never!
