If you wrote something and @Mary tweets about your content without mentioning your name, do you care?
Such was a question I posed on a Twitter poll yesterday. The results speak for themselves.
The poll was the result of a 24-hour Twitter conversation I had with Josh Peters. You can read it here in reverse chronological order:
Initiating the conversation was my observation of this tweet by Josh:
He linked to a blog article by Christopher Penn without indicating it was by someone else. To be fair, I sometimes send similar tweets, such as this:
The difference is I don’t begin such messages with a call to action, such as Josh’s “How to…” which implies someone will read it, be inspired, and click. I also used an application that created a bit.ly URL shortener, not my own domain URL–a further difference between our tweeting styles.
The poll results suggest it matters Josh didn’t cite Chris. But what do you think?
About Ari Herzog
The only reason that mine started with “How To” is because the title of the blog post was “How to calculate your social media influencer value”. If the blog post was “Holy cow something blew up” then that’s what I would have tweeted along with the link.
The problem here stems from part of our conversation and the poll you put up. Yes, people on Twitter like being attributed for stuff they create, and I try my best to put (via @UserName) when sharing. Sometimes I forget, and other times the stuff we share doesn’t come from someone who is on Twitter.
You used the argument that attribution should be equal to that of your blog. I see two problems with this argument.
1) We don’t always give attribution directly. Like if you’re talking about ROI on your blog you might link to the wikipedia definition of it, but I have never seen this or any other blog put (via Wikipedia) after linking to the term. So where’s the “attribution” there other than when you land on Wikipedia’s page? Sure sometimes people will put “according to wikipedia…” but that doesn’t always happen. I bet if I dug through your blog I could find examples where you linked to something by name or title, but didn’t mention the site it came from. I’m not going to dig through your site just to prove a point, but I hope you see where I’m coming from.
2) The platforms are similar in blogging, but not on Twitter. When you’re writing a blog post if you’re referencing something A) you have more than 140c, B) the only reason you’d be mentioning it is if you saw it online and so you can link it. Not everyone is on Twitter, yet we share content on it from all over the web. When doing this sharing from a non Twitter using site what do you suggest? At the end of every link we tweet put (via TheSiteYouAreAboutToGoTo.com)? I don’t see the point to that.
When you tweet a link and someone clicks on it they go to the site, and then they can obviously see what site it is and make decisions based on that. Lets use mine as an example. You said people might start following me because I tweeted something from Christopher Penn’s site without putting (via @CSPenn). Truly if they do, that’s not my fault. If they click on the link they will see Christopher’s name all over the site and would then want to follow him. In no way did I try to steal the content or say it was mine.
Yes I use my own link shortener that goes through my site, but so what? People don’t think that every bit.ly link goes to the bit.ly site. If you click on one single link or follow me you’ll know it’s just a link shortener.
You say that it should be the same as on a blog, but that’s just not possible due to what I’ve already said. Yes, I agree that if you share a link by someone you know is on Twitter then the polite thing to do is put (via @UserName) or something similar in your tweet. However, I don’t see it as a huge problem if you don’t. Personally I don’t care if people put (via @JoshSPeters) or not when they link one of my articles because the link goes to my site and I’m getting traffic and subscribers thanks to someone elses work.
Yes, putting (via @UserName) is the polite thing to do, but I don’t see the point of putting (via TheSiteYouAreAboutToGoTo.com) when it comes to non Twitter using sites. Do you disagree?
.-= New from Josh Peters: HOW TO: Make Facebook Your Company Newsroom – My Mashable article =-.
I hesitate to comment… but as i spent 5 valuable minutes of my life reading this blog post… i will.
A poll with 9 respondents indicates nothing. Particularly when the people responding in agreement with the poll initiator are self selecting (as followers of the initiator) and also likely (being the kind of people who care about whether they are being credited) to be interested in the topic. Those uninterested would probably follow their normal patters of disinterest and not answer. So. bad poll.
What’s really fun about this post is that it uses the content of the person being ‘discussed (hem. attacked)’ in order to drive traffic to the person doing the critique. Very nice.
My big critique has nothing to do with attempts to drive traffic or bad research methodologies, but rather with the idea that there should be one way of doing things. The people who credit others will be treated in kind. Those less giving will be less rewarded. The @ credit serves to introduce you to like minded people and is one of the best ways of creating positive community. It’s smart to do it. Is it ‘right’? Who could possibly be the arbiter of that? Why would we want a single ‘right’ way to use the internet.
We are different, likes tend to attract. No need to evangelize any single set of mores.
.-= New from dave cormier: Identity, memory, death and the internet =-.
When Tweeting a link I try to attribute the source and writer (using the Twitter ID if I can easily find it.) But I don’t always. Much depends on the character limit and how much text I need for other material.
My first priority in sharing a link is to describe it in such a way that my followers know what to expect. Ideally this gives them enough info to decided whether or not they should click through. I want to let them know what the content is about. Then if I have space, I’ll include the source (which may also be a deciding factor) and the author.
If we were using standard urls this could be skipped. If I shared an article from smashing mag you would know from the link. But with bit.ly of course the link doesn’t inform in that way. If bloggers published their own domain customized shortened urls at the end of the post (not a bad idea by the way) we could use that and achieve a similar effect.
Thankfully in most cases, our followers will find out the author as soon as they click through to the post, so it’s not as though unattributed Tweets leave users in the dark. But when space allows I do think attributions are optimal. I only leave them out when I need all of the characters to explain more about the link itself. In the end I make the decision based on how much, and what, info my followers will need to make their click through choice.
.-= New from Heidi Cool: Goal-driven social media strategies & tactics: how are you interacting with your target audience? =-.
People want people to show respect – attribution is about respect for another’s work/stuff
I’m not surprised by these results… I completely agree, when tweeting, retweeting, or sharing any type of information that comes from another, you have to give proper attribution! 
Interestingly I was just having a similar conversation from a different angle. A friend said that if I RT something but don’t put the blog author’s name in my tweet, and he’s just skimming his twitter stream, he might miss a post from people he likes. Someone else said they always add the author’s name so they will see in their @ replies that you tweeted their stuff.
For me, it actually entirely depends where I’m tweeting from. If I am reading a really good post I’ll “bitly” it from the original blog site so I can track if people click on it; I’ll usually add commentary, sometimes including the author’s name (eg “[@whoever has a great post on xxx"]. If I’m skimming though stuff in my Google Reader, I share it, which goes to Friendfeed then to Twitter automatically but I can’t add any text to the tweet. If I’m on my iphone, I’ll just RT something good and will rarely change the original tweet, regardlessof whether it’s from the actual blogger or from someone else tweeting their post.
Either way, I always assumed that everyone had all their alerts set up so they would know if I tweeted a link to their blog no matter what – @ reply or not. (I do this for my own stuff through SocialOomph for keywords and BackTweets for my url). Having had this conversation though, I realize they actually might not have this all set up like I do, so I plan to make more of an effort to add the @reply to the blogger, assuming I know who they are on Twitter. I now see it as part of relationship building.
.-= New from Maddie Grant: The Xer Meme: Have we sold out? =-.
I agree, people need to site their sources as we used to say in highschool. It does not need ot be a professional bibliography or work cited, but a mentioning of the website would be very good. Thanks!