Yesterday I received a message through Facebook asking for my permission to use one of my older videos on their TV Network’s website, and/or social media. The message contained a number of links to other sites which, which admittedly made me question the validity/sincerity of the message.
My first instinct was to disregard the message as spam and not give it a second thought. So I put my phone back in my pocket. But I was curious, and this small Bob Goff like voice was telling me to reply.
- Side Note: If you are not familiar with Bob Goff and the amazing things he’s been able to accomplish, I implore you to quickly google him and you will soon understand what I am referring to. He is an incredible person, to say the very least, with a quirky personality that explodes out of him. But his personality can really be summed up with his cell phone number. If you open his best selling book, Love Does, and flip to the to the back he listed his personal cell phone number. If you are skeptical that it is truly his number, I challenge you to call it… there is a very good chance he will actually answer or return your call.
With that Bob Goff voice nudging me, I pulled my phone back out of my pocket and opened the message again. As I looked at the content of the message, I noticed two big difference between this message and normal spam messages. First, it was very well written with no noticeable grammatical errors and included an abundance of detail including a business address. Second, the links included in the message did not consist of strings of special characters. They were simple and clear.
I know exactly how easy it is to mask a hyper link, and I am not about to carelessly open anything potentially malicious. So to be on the safe side I did some additional digging. Long story short, the sources checked out. The company as well as the specific person who reached out to me appeared to be a real.
So I was out of excuses and was left thinking, “what’s the worst that could happen?” I clicked on every link in the message, and was happy to see that they were all legit.
This morning I replied and gave them permission to use my video with just a couple of stipulations. Since I don’t have the user base to warrant someone paying me to use my content, all I asked for in return for allowing them to use my video is that they give credit in some way to Foley Woodworking, and that they send me links to the places my video is used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Tang_Dynasty_Television
https://bobgoff.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Goff