Always attribute - LinkedIn Tutorial

- I got an email yesterday from a lawyer at LinkedIn saying that one of the top contributors had an image that had to be pulled down. Now this guy writes a tremendous number of stories that do incredibly well. He's a great writer, but he'd inadvertently grabbed a picture that he didn't have the rights to use. This happens all the time by people who are well-seasoned to writing or totally new to it. It's very important to make sure that you have the rights to use the images you're using, and more broadly, that you're giving attribution throughout your work. So let's talk about the rights part of it. When you use an image or an infographic, someone has created those and they have the rights to them. You can find images that you can use by doing a couple things. On search engines like Flickr and Google, they'll have a way to search just for creative commons images. Images where the original creator said, "It's okay for you to use them." You can use those with attribution. When it comes to attribution, it's a bigger question of how do you make sure that you are giving credit to people who have come before you? When you use a quote from someone, when you are riffing off an idea that someone else has had, it's incredibly important to give credit, to make sure that you are acknowledging that they've discussed this before, that you're building off a conversation. If you use a big paragraph, make sure you're linking back to the original work, make sure you're saying who said it. Everyone understands that our ideas aren't original, they are built off of things that you've learned or heard over time. Make sure you're giving credit to other people. There's an added benefit to doing that, which is that when you add to someone else's conversation, they're more likely to come back and talk to you again. So they can help amplify your work if you say, "Hey, I just quoted you in my story," or, "I loved the post that you wrote last week, "and I mentioned here and I add my own thoughts." Those are the kind of things that will generate a conversation which mean that you're ideas go much more broad than you could have imagined.