msredmond

Truly, truly awful.

Great tool -- just sent it to our designer. Thanks for sharing.

There's been a lot of layoffs in technical company's marketing departments over past few years, so there's PLENTY of candidates out there that understand tech and can market well (and should be affordable). Some tips:

- What KIND of marketing do you need? Sales? Leads? Branding? PR? Know what you want and what kind of marketing skills in general would provide that (e-mail campaigns, buying ads, working with press, A/B web testing, etc.) so you can ask for specific experience in those marketing approaches.

- Make sure the person can WRITE well. There's a lot of good marketing people out there (great at developing campaigns, analytics, etc.) who can't write -- and you don't need that at a small shop; you won't be able to afford outsourcing every project to a freelance writer. Ask for samples and give a writing test.

- Marketing is all about results -- if they can't go into detail about how this project they did compared to that project they did compared to industry average, walk away.

Just like any other job, references are big. Talk to people you trust; they probably know someone who knows someone who is perfect and is just out of work right now because of the downsizing.

I had to send five "what browser are you using" e-mails just last Friday. And people never send the OS when we ask. Thank you, thank you for making this.

Agreed Danso. Although think it could be argued technically that it's not "plagarism," but could be considered to be ripping off the people who paid you for the article. And there is copyright issues depending on who owns it. And, of course, it's sleezy at the amount he did it. So maybe several levels here.

"The point is that even though these transgressions seem minor in quantity, for a professional journalist to have justified committing them requires either a total burst of sudden professional insanity...or a long, undiscovered history of other transgressions." <<+100 -- as a journalist, i think this is the most insightful comment on this thread. I suspect even more will come out.

I'm a journalist -- technically you can't plagiarize yourself, so while not best form, it's not really anything "wrong." And often there's certain phrases that as a writer you are going to use over and again (he took it well beyond that though). So that's why he was still around. But yes making up quotes is WAY across the line. I'm curious if he just up and resigned knowing he would be fired; if I were his boss, I'd rather fire him to make sure people know how serious his transgressions are.

Mind-boggling that people don't realize that the word evolution is a word in and of itself.

Nice --- really like the layout