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.
One thing that has become standard practice for me is to have any "contact us" forms or error reporting pages automatically include all of this information when sending messages. I also generally record persist the browser information on important "events" such as registration and login, so I can refer to it if I need it later.
You don't need it most of the time, but it saves so much time to not have to bother asking for it.
"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.
Self-plagiarism is most definitely not as "wrong" as plagiarizing from someone else. But in some contexts, the amount of work you've produced for esteemed publications is essentially part of your prestige and resume. To have significant number of pieces actually just be recycled material, while bragging about how you were published in X, Y, Z magazine, is looked down upon.
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.
If it's only a handful, you're never going to last on the front page for long -- it's part of the standard HN algorithm (something with time/number of votes and maybe something with spread in vote count over time -- at least that's what it seems to be)
Let's perform a thought experiment, all completely hypothetical, of course.
Suppose someone, call them R, has been on HN for over three years. Suppose also that over those years R has, for various reasons, ended up with more than one HN username.
Suppose that R noticed some interesting behavior in relation to flags and rankings and decided to investigate. Waiting until one of his (or her) submissions hit the front page, R then used the other usernames to flag it and watch how the ranking changed. Having done that, R then unflagged the submission to check that it returned to its previous ranking, providing evidence (although obviously not a guarantee) that there had been no other flags to affect the ranking.
At the end of that R would hve a pretty good idea of how many flags were needed to change the ranking of an item.
Would you agree?
Having worked it out, though, R might decide not to make this information public. Why? Perhaps because R respects PG's decision not to make various details of the rankings system public, and chooses to cooperate.
So now, you claim that I "have no idea how many flags are needed." In the light of the above completely hypothetical thought experiment let me ask:
Are you sure?
Added in edit: In response to the replies to the above thought experiment, let me add that "a flag or two" was not intended to be taken literally. My apologies if you thought I literally meant either exactly one or exactly two. I did not. In hindsight perhaps I should've said "a few." I do not, however, intend to make public exactly what I do know about this issue.
In reply, I can tell you I've just taken an item off the Front Page with two flags, and then put it back again afterwards by unflagging.
Added in edit: Cool - I report the results of an actual experiment providing evidence in a discussion, and I get a downvote. Fascinating - I clearly still have much to learn about the people who read and react on Hacker News. I have no idea why this should get a downvote.
