Creative commons and facilitating mashups to spread your ideas

I'm a huge fan of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that makes it easy for people to both share and build upon the work of others.

With a CC attribution, originators of works assert legal copyright ownership but grant free licenses to creative work so others can share, remix, use commercially, or some combination of mashup.

This strategy of losing control and facilitating sharing of content is dramatically different than the typical corporate approach of demanding email registration via squeeze pages and slapping draconian "do not copy" restrictions on content.

Many people tell me they don't like to share content this way because they don't get the inbound links that are generated. I think that's a shortsighted argument because the more people who know you, your company, and its ideas, the more will want to visit to learn more.

When you allow mashups, you never know what interesting things will emerge.

There are thousands of mashups created from my work. I found some fun ones this morning for the first time as I was thinking about this article. Consider just a few:

A publisher in Bulgaria translated my ebook The New Rules of PR into Bulgarian and created a Bulgarian language Facebook page to promote my work and the local language edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

A company in Japan, News2U created a Japanese language version of my free Marketing Strategy Template.

Kathy Drewien & Company took another one of my ebooks The New Rules of Viral Marketing and turned it into a slideshare that has over 1,800 views. These are views of the ebook I might not have generated otherwise.

Pushan Banerjee from Hyderabad, India created a presentation based on some of my ideas and gave me credit.

So many companies are looking to generate attention. Using the old rules, you have to buy attention or beg for it. But the new way is to earn attention by creating something interesting and then using a creative commons approach to making it spreadable.

It's not just authors who can use this strategy. Anybody can. Rock bands, churches, B2B companies, consumer brands, nonprofits, colleges, sports teams...

What interesting mashups have you been able to achieve for your organization?

Image: Shutterstock / Africa Studio

Comments

[Farida Harianawala]

I just started a new blog and was considering adding the Creative Commons license but did not really know what the benefits/pros/cons of it were. I think the reason for creating content, especially on a blog, should be to share it freely and amplify its reach, which the Creative Commons license seems to make possible. This was useful information. Thank you.

[Julia Stewart]

I'm just getting started using Creative Commons copyrighting on my free coach training program. People love it! I've decided to use it for my students who get certified, so they can teach my material and alter it to make it their own. One of the pitfalls of coach training is that we invariably create our own competition. I decided to embrace that and plan on it.

[David Meerman Scott]

Farida - Glad it was helpful.

Julia - Good for you! As someone who knows, when you create competition, you also create advocates.

[expressimpression]

Creative common is new concept for me. I do have a new blog this might be what I need for it to get going. But I did use your books The New Rules of Viral Marketing and The New Rules of Marketing & PR in my thesis and class presentation. Thank you for great information once again David.

[Miguel Montoya]

Hi from Lima Peru.
I got you book RAVE couple of months ago, fine one, goes to the chase. I been reading it cover to cover many times. I´m a designer, but with kinda marketer heart starting to growing up after your book. So I´m building up step by step a better web image, a catching blog, and what I call "design to marketing" focused site, not easy task at all, but in two months from 2 visits daily I got over 60 now days. And from 1 forms in a month or two, now I got 3 to 4 per week. I know these may looks like small numbers, but relatively are not at all. Think this, whole Peru is less than an average state from US of Internet users, and the number one in design here has years to get couple of forms daily. I´m confident I´ll get them in 6 months and pass them next year. I Hope. This "Creative commons" you mention sounds really cool to me. So, if you please give me accurate tips or appropriate suggestions about it I´ll appreciate it a lot.
Thank you very much David.

Yours

Miguel Montoya
www.YconoArt.com