Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What they mean is, when someone pays attention to you and respects what you do enough to reproduce one of your original ideas or activities you should be flattered. And we usually are.
Last July, before the release of his New York Times bestseller, Trust Agents, I approached Chris Brogan with an idea for a Twitter giveaway. I proposed that we give away 50 copies of his book on the day of its launch to the first 50 people who tweeted about a brand awareness campaign we were running. The campaign centered on our Video Marketing Quiz which is a fun interactive game that tests your knowledge of video as an effective marketing tool.
We were overwhelmed with the results. As soon as Chris tweeted about the giveaway, everything went nuts with thousands of people taking the quiz and tweeting about it afterwards. It was such a simple idea, yet it worked so well for us and we were tremendously grateful to Chris for his support and proud to be part of the launch for Trust Agents.
We knew it was a successful idea when Chris ran with it and instigated the exact same promotion with his pals at LinkedIn less than a month later. I’m sure it’s not the last time we will see Twitter used in this way.
This week our Video Marketing Quiz saw another form of imitation as Omniture, the web analytics company that was recently bought by Adobe, released an interactive game that tests your knowledge of banner ads as an effective marketing tool. If you disregard the background, the awkward fonts and the clumsy interface that never quite clicks on what you want to click, it’s eerily similar to our own Video Marketing Quiz. All of which goes to prove a few things:
- If something works for someone else, you might be able to make it work for you
- If you want to know who’s listening, check who’s copying
- Great ideas belong to the world (but it’s always nice to know you had them first!)
