Ask and you shall receive (mostly). Don’t ask and you might tick someone off.

A while back, I got minor-ly embroiled in a little “situation” with a customer of one of my clients.

Here’s the story:

As part of my work for this client, I have frequent conversations with customers. Someone in the marketing group, whom I don’t usually work with, let me know that she was planning on using quotes from a couple of customers in some collateral she was pulling together. The quotes were taken from posts that these customers had made on a customer forum, not for the interviews I’d done with them. Anyway, because she knew that I had recently spoken to both of these customers and, thus, “knew” them, she asked me to contact them to get their pictures to use with the quotes.

I was happy enough to do this  - they are both great guys, very pro-my-client-company-and-its-products, and fun to “do business with.” So I dropped them each a line (including the quote that was being used, and the context it was being used in).

One of the guys got his picture off to me right away; the other one wrote back and kinda-sorta asked why we were using a quote from him without his permission.

Yikes!

I let him know where the quote had come from - which is at least a semi-public space - and ensured him that we would let him see how it was being used before we published the piece, etc.

I understand perfectly how the marketing person ran with these quotes. But even though they were already on our website (albeit in a password-protected section), we really should have contacted both of the folks whose words we were going to be using to get their permission. And, before I reached out to these guys for their pictures, I should have checked to see whether permission had been granted. (I did have a suspicion that we hadn’t bothered to ask.)

All is now good, and both customers have okayed using their words and their pictures.

But lesson learned: never assume that a customer is going to be okay with your using their words, unless they’ve explicitly given you their approval.

I don’t think you need to be completely obsessive here. If someone has allowed you to publish a case study, or they’ve participated in a webcast that’s “out there,” or has provided a press quote, I do think it’s okay to re-purpose what they’ve said for use in a PowerPoint preso. It really depends on how you’re going to use it. You should never use material from another source in a press release. No one wants to se their name go out over the wire without knowing in advance that it’s going to happen.

When you do re-use quoted material, you have to be very careful that you aren’t taking something out of context, or implying (deliberately or not) more than the customer has actually said.

Bottom line, you’re really better off letting a customer know what you’re doing. (”Just wanted to let you know that we’ll be using this quote from the webcast - ‘this is the best mousetrap in the world’ - in the new data sheet for Mousetrap 2.0. It will be used in a sidebar, with your name and company name. Let me know if you want to see a copy before we post the pdf.’”)

Most of the time, it’s going to be a case of ask, and you shall receive.

You can, of course, follow the ‘better to ask forgiveness than permission’ philosophy. Personally, I don’t think it’s a great idea to take customers for granted.

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