Subscribe Feed (RSS)Never Accuse Your Customer Without Having All the Facts! AND Don’t Steal People’s Content!
April 17th, 2007 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under Commentary, Content, Marketing, Websites.Last week, I wrote an article about good customer service and used the example of how EzineArticles.com failed to live up to their promise to contact me about a situation. I am happy to report that I have finally been contacted by the company. The interesting thing is that the company broke another cardinal rule, research first and accuse later.
Don’t Assume You’ve got All The Facts Until You Do!
Here is the content of the email I received:
Hi Joshua,
Your account is suspended because your article “Hiring the Right
Property Manager for Your Rental/Income Property” has content that is
exactly the same as this piece:http://www.wcrt.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1526
…and is not attributed to you. We require that all submitted
articles be either original articles written by you or articles to
which you have an exclusive right to. Please keep in mind that to
have an exclusive right to an article, only your name may be
associated with it. If you purchased this article as part of a pack
or received it from a distributor/affiliate site, so have others so
you do not have an exclusive right to it.Can you please explain the above? What is the source of your article?
Abby
http://EzineArticles.com/
A few things . . . first, wouldn’t it make more sense if they had contacted me last year when I submitted the article with their inquiry? Instead, I was flatly banned WITH NO EXPLANATION. They assumed I was the one who was not the original author instead of doing 1 of 2 things: 1) contacting me asking me to prove I am the author or 2) doing 1 minute of research to see if I was the author. A google search of the first line of the article in question reveals the truth:
A little article I wrote back in October of 2005 called: Things to Consider when Interviewing Property Management Companies comes up immediately. It would be very clear to see that the duplicated article that they were talking about was written January 30, 2006, 3 months later.
In addition, the email assumes that I was the one committing the copyright infringement, when in fact it was someone from another site doing it. I was guilty until proven innovent! This is certainly not the way to run a service.
What Can Be Learned Here?
- Don’t assume that you have all the facts until you actually do.
- Choose your words wisely. In tone and content, it apears as though the people at EZineArticles are accusing me of stealing someone else’s articles. Accusing someone is not the way to make them happy customers/users.
- If you say you’re going to respond to someone in 24 hours, then do it.
- Don’t get on my bad side! (just kidding . . . kind of . . . )
Further Implications of The Situation
I am somewhat thankful for the whole controversy for one reason: I was able to discover that one of the users of my company, BiggerPockets’s forums was stealing our materials and posting them as his own. As a result, I emailed him asking him to immediately remove the article from his site, and warned him that I would contact his host if he failed to comply. We shall see what happens . . . back to my 7 Steps on How to Protect Your Website’s Copyright When Someone Steals Your Content.
I’ll keep you posted of any further developments!
Hi Josh
Interesting you should mention this. I had a similar incident with EzineArticles myself. But mine was a little more bizarre. Three weeks after having an article approved by Ezine, I saw my article on a site and noticed it contained a typo. So I went to my account and edited the article and re-submitted it. The article was rejected and I was asked to contact them. After two weeks of repeatedly submitting contact forms with no reply, my article miraculously reappeared on the site, with no explanation or apology. Life is surly strange over at EzineArticles.
Have a great day.
Carol King.
I can’t explain the action of others, only my own – me
[...] service is Paramount! If you treat your customers like crap, there will be a backlash against you, especially in the days of the internet. If you treat them [...]
[...] We were recently publicly tweaked by EzineArticles expert author Josh Dorkin in his blog: Never Accuse Your Customer Without Having All the Facts! AND Don’t Steal People’s Content! [...]
I know how you feel Josh, I had a “Trade Journal” once that I submitted an article and they claimed the same thing. Turns out someone had taken my article from someone who had stolen it and put their own name on it and the trade journal editor saw it and accused me of article theft, heck I was the victim. I would say that not only was that a pretty decent article and that you are a good writer, but also because of this fact people often have their articles stolen and they show up around the Internet with someone else’s name on them? Interesting isn’t it. Be well Josh, keep up the great work.
Thanks for your words here and on the apology post Lance.
[...] the situation that occurred with Ezine Articles. For those of you who don’t, have a look at Never Accuse Your Customer Without Having All the Facts! AND Don’t Steal People’s Content!. In brief, I submitted an article to this site that syndicates articles, but my article was [...]
customers are king. We can’t argue with them, right or wrong. A marketer must be patient enough to take the critisism.
The reason that this happened to you is because EzineArticles treats their employees terrible. They can’t hold onto any editors long enough to gain any consistency. Interesting how Chris Knight’s reply to your post on his blog actually named the editor that sent you the reply he had wrote! Talk about classless. Isn’t management suppose to stand by their employees, not throw them to the sharks? Unfortunately you will never find consistency with EzineArticles because they can’t hold on to their employees long enough to train them properly. So Chris Knight gets a big “Thanks for admitting you were wrong!” and some employee left crying I am sure for doing what they were asked to do by Chris.
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