Paper Town

In the era where consumers of content are becoming prosumers and copyright and intellectual property rights get questioned even more how do you ensure you own the originality of what you created? 

Oh wait ! You may wonder but I don’t really create anything ! I would contradict that cause every role today requires us to bring in some ingenuity in our work. In case you are not doing that then your job could be the next one going to the bots ! So whatever you create in the sales role – every new proposal / solution, in customer service – every new script to manage customer expectations, in operations – every new workflow for effectiveness and efficiency, in quality – every new criteria and metrics. Everything you create you can leave your mark on it. 

Leave your Paper town in your creation. In early years this concept was started by map makers cause making a map was tedious and a huge investment so to mark their copy they would somewhere in the map hide a town that doesn’t really exist. Then if someone just copied their map they could identify it by the paper town. 

So in everything you create hide in there a small paper town that will tell you its your original. Something they won’t even know if they replicated it but you know cause you put it there. Just be sure it doesn’t effect the performance of your creation. 

Every proposal I submit I have a paper town in it and I know if the client picked it up and used it for their internal presentations or if competition got their hands on it. Can be a fun thing to do ! Its like a tag you can then see where your stuff is landing up. Paper towns safeguard your originality and also become like your own hidden signature. Every article I publish on LinkedIn has a paper town, my own little mark somewhere, cause I love the share button but am wary of the Ctrl-C Ctrl V ones !

So go ahead, get creative and leave your own Paper Town in your creation !