If that was the aim, posting text as an image with a legal spin in a font that's difficult to read... Yes, this sounds like something a corporate would do.
Some companies/startups intentionally invoke bad press/unpopular opinions under the theory that any-publicity-is-good-publicity.
From the comments made in the thread by Edmond, this does not appear to be the case in this circumstance, and the tweet is a genuine case of marketing ignorance.
No, this is intentional. They're using the hashtag for advertising. What good is a hashtag if nobody is using it? Of course they need to look ignorant, that's the fuel for the viral fire.
Which, IMO, is a lousy theory. Publicity is supposed to serve an end. Publicity that does not do so is useless at best. Many circles of marketing seem to have turned publicity into an end itself.
The trick here is that people quickly forget the context but will recognize the brand the next time they see it. The "I know it from somewhere..." effect.
That said, a lot of times if you see publicity for sake of publicity, there's someone there making ad-dollars on eyeballs. Here any publicity really is good publicity.
seems as if the twitter user that asked people to not use the hashtag "#shopedmond" unless they were a paying customer as his company had trademarked the rights to the hashtag "#shopedmond", the rest of the twitter users were then taking the piss out of him for his attempt to a) prevent people using the hashtag and b) for trying to trademark it.
Although to be fair he wanted to stop businesses using it not the public in general, but why let the facts get in the way of a good old fashioned rabble rousing.
The differences between businesses and public are not at all clear.
contractor - business?, employee acting on behalf of business, employee at work but not work related, self-employed person in unrelated field, person how use of hashtag gets them noticed and hired, etc.
Any of those who change over time. I hashtaged when I was the public but now I'm head of marketing at competitor.
Their post didn't make it even remotely clear that they were only talking to businesses and not the public at large. Maybe that was by design; this is giving them a huge amount of publicity.
TBH it sounds like they're just using reverse psychology to get their brand trending and it's working really well because now I'm reading about them on HackerNews.
Baseless speculation: trademarks must be defended or you lose them. This company trademarked a hashtag and got legal advice that they must at least make a visible effort to control the term.
Kleenex e.g. must fight the conception that their trademarked name is a generic term for a tissue.
You need to defend it against people using it generically. You don't need to stop people from using your trademark to refer to your trademarked product name it is trademarked to refer to.
I don't think it's that clear cut. The magazine is "Edmond Active" while the hashtag is #shopedmond, which is neither the name of the business or their product.
However, the city on question is Edmond, OK and they're encouraging you to shop there, so erm, "shop edmond". Not exactly a convincing trademark.
This was a very funny joke. Bravo. #shopedmond. Can't use because copyright. LOL. Made my day. They've got a sense of humor over there. Keep up the good work you savvy netziens.
I grew up in this city, so it is surreal to see it on HN.
Edmond is a special place that you must understand to make any sense of this story. It is effectively Republican Heaven. It is a small town, well-eduated, white, wealthy, growing, and suburban. Lots of small business owners and people who have made their own $1M, which they naturally achieved through some combination of hard work and attending church regularly so that your customers and business partners will trust you. Cost of living is shockingly low. All the economic, racial, and social issues in our country are happening somewhere else very far away, and the biggest threat Edmond faces is that the faraway people may and/or already have begun to change things and therefore ruin Republican Heaven.
This company exists in that context, capitalizing on a high concentration of small business owners, offering them what effectively amounts to advertising services that theoretically convert into walkins to your hair salon or whatever.
Edmond has a strange relationship with social media. On the one hand, social media is big business, and big business is always, always good. On the other hand, social media was created by a bunch of faraway Blue-State Liberal Commies. So in general they would be one part in favor of exploiting it, one part completely ignorant about how to do that, and one part determined to do it differently than the Liberal Commies do.
All of that to say, forming a cartel around a hashtag is an entirely plausible business model for Edmond. If a business used it without paying, well, that's cheating, and cheating is a sin, and you'll never sin your way to making your $1M. All you have to do is put out a passive aggressive note reminding people you have a trademark or something and the bad actors will be sufficiently shamed to change their ways.
And the social media backlash is, obviously, just a bunch of Blue-State Liberal Commies who live too far to visit your hair salon anyway, so nobody cares about them or their opinions.
The real problem this company faces is proving that a hashtag translates into increased hair salon appointments, which is the kind of problem Edmond actually cares about. Small business owners take much more seriously than SV culture the concept of value for money. If it's not effective advertising it will be dead in the water, with or without any help from outside.
Then it may surprise you to learn I still live in the South :-)
I understand how it could be read as a bit of a partisan attack, particularly around this time of year. In reality though, I think every place has its own dysfunction. It's just that Edmond's particular dysfunction is both important to understanding the story, and very foreign to HN readers, whereas detailing the dysfunctions of other areas might "provide balance" but would not help anyone make sense of this story.
But to provide balance anyway, Edmond is very different than most people's idea of "red area". The population is very highly educated. The public school system is universally loved, and there's even a public university that is excellent. So when you hear someone express their hatred for "big government" it is in the context of empowering a local government that provides actual services that are very competently administrated, not, e.g. a desire to burn everything down.
It is also one of the only semi-urban areas I can think of where minimum wage is definitely a living wage, jobs are available to anyone who wants to work, "corporation" means your next-door neighbor's 10-employee plumbing company, etc. So I think an argument can be made that "red" policies make much more sense there than otherwise expected.
It is really the sort of place that produces a William Buckley [0]. It's a pragmatic, intellectual, moderate branch of conservatism, that is growing concerned about its own extinction. Based on this election, I think it's a pretty justified fear.
I don't think you would understand how hard it is to speak, as someone with real world experience, about small-town Oklahoma unless you have lived in small-town Oklahoma... its a special kind of place. And special in this context isnt a compliment.
"In 2013 the first US applications to trademark hashtags started being submitted. And while it's impossible to stop ordinary people talking about the event online using registered hashtags, it is now possible to restrict what companies do."
Well sure, but the real trap is completely not understanding trademarks. As a person (not a company, not representing a company, etc.) you can say/use/whatever with a trademark.
Trademarks only affected another business's use of that trademark, not individual people. Its truly comical that people don't understand this.
Note though that they only claim "marketing and advertising" for the hashtag [1]. They don't deny anyone from using it in an ordinary Twitter discussion.
So all the people that now try to invoke the streisand effect against them are not even touching their claim, however valid or invalid or may be. If anything, they make the hashtag more valuable for advertisers.
This reminds me of incidents in the past were colors (some special shade of magenta, Deutsche Telekom) or letters (greek alpha, Canon) were trademarked, apparently without much discussion. As I understood it, the reason was that a trademark does not forbid general use by the public. It "only" forbids using it as brand identifiers and for advertising.
Whether hashtags can actually be trademarked is of course a different question. But I don't see how it would be more crazy than trademarking a color.
Their claim isn't important at this point. Invoking the Streisand effect by that tone-deaf tweet has just driven its marketing value into the toilet by way of negative association and associated shitposting.
Every discussion can be turn into a meta discussion, and good advertisers know that. This is one of the reason why "it doesn't matter whether it's good or bad, as long as they're talking about you"...
Why wouldn't they be able to trademark "#Rio2016"? Just like with Apple computer, Apple Music, and the apple farm down the road, #Rio2016 should still be available for other uses. You just can't try to confuse people into thinking you sponsor the Olympics with it.
A trademark is a source identifier that is intended to prevent consumer confusion as to the source of a particular good or service. An average consumer will see the mark "McDonalds" on a fast food restaurant while traveling and assume that it is connected with the "McDonalds" in their hometown, that they can expect the same menu and quality of food, etc. It prevents the confusion that would be caused by 10 different "McDonalds", each varying in food and/or service quality.
In my view, a hashtag DOES NOT identify a source. It merely identifies a topic. The @EdmondActive is the source identifier. Companies AND the USPTO are not well informed on topics such as this.
Think about color for a moment. If you see a brown cargo van, do you immediately think of UPS? It is likely. When you see magenta in the realm of wireless carriers, do you immediately assume it is in connection with T-Mobile? In lesser known niche markets, the color of a product is even more identifiable and, thus, protectable.
If I were to launch a parcel delivery company, use brown cargo trucks, and clothe my drivers in brown uniforms, consumers would likely confuse my delivery company for UPS, and I would be freeriding on the goodwill that they have created with consumers.
Hence, colors are rightfully protected. Hashtags should not be.
Yep. The trademark litmus test is whether or not there is a "likelihood of confusion" with the business that owns/claims said trademark. So if I was to create and sell a t-shirt with, say, a photo of Mickey Mouse on it, Disney could sue me and claim I was infringing upon their trademark (the mouse), and causing customers to think that my shirts were from Disney.
So it doesn't have to be within the same type of business - it just has to be likely to cause confusion.
(In the case of UPS brown, it would make sense that it can't be used by another delivery service on their trucks, given how prominent it is to the UPS brand. But for a grocery store, for instance, that color wouldn't cause confusion.)
THere's a midwestern dry cleaner suing the IOC over this right now. This seems frivolous, at first, but it's actually a legal grey area in that it doesn't seem like anyone has ruled specifically on it.
When I see things like this, I always make a mental note never to patronize the business (or in the case of a city/state, never to visit).
Maybe the small effect of voting with my wallet would be more likely to be noticed if I sent a note: "Hi there, because of $ACTION_I_DISAGREE_WITH, I've decided not to patronize your business anymore"
Seems to me the octothorpe is an AT&T or Bell Labs invention. I recall some crazy discussion in Murray Hill before I knew anything about Unix or telephony... LOL
The ignorance in this thread is amazing, but I suppose this site is for software and not business people. So many of these comments are completely misinformed and incorrect about how trademarks/etc work.
HN comments are mostly quality when on topic, but toss out another discipline that people assume to understand with their common knowledge and.. well, here we are.
I had originally trademarked this phrase with Spanish style exclamation marks, but then put it in the public domain, because I loves me so folks. Let all your sharp pencils be free! Write baby, write!
And,,, seriously though, this is why technology is NOT democratic by default, and why people must actively, forcefully work to democratize technology based social, community, and cultural infrastructure. If it can't be found outside of human civilization in a form ready to be picked up or stumbled over, and someone gets to it before you, they'll likely claim it for their own. Lame.
62 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 53.8 ms ] threadFrom the comments made in the thread by Edmond, this does not appear to be the case in this circumstance, and the tweet is a genuine case of marketing ignorance.
They got everyone, hook, line, and sinker.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I agree with your parent post, this has been done intentionally to get people to use #shopedmond.
Which, IMO, is a lousy theory. Publicity is supposed to serve an end. Publicity that does not do so is useless at best. Many circles of marketing seem to have turned publicity into an end itself.
That said, a lot of times if you see publicity for sake of publicity, there's someone there making ad-dollars on eyeballs. Here any publicity really is good publicity.
Although to be fair he wanted to stop businesses using it not the public in general, but why let the facts get in the way of a good old fashioned rabble rousing.
[1] https://issuu.com/edmondactive/docs/edmondactive_janfeb2014 (pg 3. Note down the bottom of that page they claim the trademark to #shopedmond"
contractor - business?, employee acting on behalf of business, employee at work but not work related, self-employed person in unrelated field, person how use of hashtag gets them noticed and hired, etc.
Any of those who change over time. I hashtaged when I was the public but now I'm head of marketing at competitor.
Kleenex e.g. must fight the conception that their trademarked name is a generic term for a tissue.
However, the city on question is Edmond, OK and they're encouraging you to shop there, so erm, "shop edmond". Not exactly a convincing trademark.
What do they sell?
How long have they been around?
Do you think their product is ok even if they do silly things on twitter?
Edmond is a special place that you must understand to make any sense of this story. It is effectively Republican Heaven. It is a small town, well-eduated, white, wealthy, growing, and suburban. Lots of small business owners and people who have made their own $1M, which they naturally achieved through some combination of hard work and attending church regularly so that your customers and business partners will trust you. Cost of living is shockingly low. All the economic, racial, and social issues in our country are happening somewhere else very far away, and the biggest threat Edmond faces is that the faraway people may and/or already have begun to change things and therefore ruin Republican Heaven.
This company exists in that context, capitalizing on a high concentration of small business owners, offering them what effectively amounts to advertising services that theoretically convert into walkins to your hair salon or whatever.
Edmond has a strange relationship with social media. On the one hand, social media is big business, and big business is always, always good. On the other hand, social media was created by a bunch of faraway Blue-State Liberal Commies. So in general they would be one part in favor of exploiting it, one part completely ignorant about how to do that, and one part determined to do it differently than the Liberal Commies do.
All of that to say, forming a cartel around a hashtag is an entirely plausible business model for Edmond. If a business used it without paying, well, that's cheating, and cheating is a sin, and you'll never sin your way to making your $1M. All you have to do is put out a passive aggressive note reminding people you have a trademark or something and the bad actors will be sufficiently shamed to change their ways.
And the social media backlash is, obviously, just a bunch of Blue-State Liberal Commies who live too far to visit your hair salon anyway, so nobody cares about them or their opinions.
The real problem this company faces is proving that a hashtag translates into increased hair salon appointments, which is the kind of problem Edmond actually cares about. Small business owners take much more seriously than SV culture the concept of value for money. If it's not effective advertising it will be dead in the water, with or without any help from outside.
I understand how it could be read as a bit of a partisan attack, particularly around this time of year. In reality though, I think every place has its own dysfunction. It's just that Edmond's particular dysfunction is both important to understanding the story, and very foreign to HN readers, whereas detailing the dysfunctions of other areas might "provide balance" but would not help anyone make sense of this story.
But to provide balance anyway, Edmond is very different than most people's idea of "red area". The population is very highly educated. The public school system is universally loved, and there's even a public university that is excellent. So when you hear someone express their hatred for "big government" it is in the context of empowering a local government that provides actual services that are very competently administrated, not, e.g. a desire to burn everything down.
It is also one of the only semi-urban areas I can think of where minimum wage is definitely a living wage, jobs are available to anyone who wants to work, "corporation" means your next-door neighbor's 10-employee plumbing company, etc. So I think an argument can be made that "red" policies make much more sense there than otherwise expected.
It is really the sort of place that produces a William Buckley [0]. It's a pragmatic, intellectual, moderate branch of conservatism, that is growing concerned about its own extinction. Based on this election, I think it's a pretty justified fear.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley_Jr.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36915565
"In 2013 the first US applications to trademark hashtags started being submitted. And while it's impossible to stop ordinary people talking about the event online using registered hashtags, it is now possible to restrict what companies do."
Rio2016 is also a little insane. I guess no one else is going to rio in 2016.
You're falling into the same trap as some a few others -- a generic term doesn't necessarily disqualify it from being trademarked.
Trademarks only affected another business's use of that trademark, not individual people. Its truly comical that people don't understand this.
So all the people that now try to invoke the streisand effect against them are not even touching their claim, however valid or invalid or may be. If anything, they make the hashtag more valuable for advertisers.
This reminds me of incidents in the past were colors (some special shade of magenta, Deutsche Telekom) or letters (greek alpha, Canon) were trademarked, apparently without much discussion. As I understood it, the reason was that a trademark does not forbid general use by the public. It "only" forbids using it as brand identifiers and for advertising.
Whether hashtags can actually be trademarked is of course a different question. But I don't see how it would be more crazy than trademarking a color.
[1] https://twitter.com/EdmondActive/status/761406212122431488
So what if they're "right"? They still lost.
In my view, a hashtag DOES NOT identify a source. It merely identifies a topic. The @EdmondActive is the source identifier. Companies AND the USPTO are not well informed on topics such as this.
Think about color for a moment. If you see a brown cargo van, do you immediately think of UPS? It is likely. When you see magenta in the realm of wireless carriers, do you immediately assume it is in connection with T-Mobile? In lesser known niche markets, the color of a product is even more identifiable and, thus, protectable.
If I were to launch a parcel delivery company, use brown cargo trucks, and clothe my drivers in brown uniforms, consumers would likely confuse my delivery company for UPS, and I would be freeriding on the goodwill that they have created with consumers.
Hence, colors are rightfully protected. Hashtags should not be.
So it doesn't have to be within the same type of business - it just has to be likely to cause confusion.
(In the case of UPS brown, it would make sense that it can't be used by another delivery service on their trucks, given how prominent it is to the UPS brand. But for a grocery store, for instance, that color wouldn't cause confusion.)
Maybe the small effect of voting with my wallet would be more likely to be noticed if I sent a note: "Hi there, because of $ACTION_I_DISAGREE_WITH, I've decided not to patronize your business anymore"
It seems the owner of the mark is only claiming ownership in oklahoma (which may be why the mark isn't found in the USTPO lists)
http://newsok.com/article/5512593
EDIT: I'd be interested to know if these tweets fall foul of US rules about promoted content.
https://twitter.com/EdmondActive/status/761416672167157761
https://twitter.com/EdmondActive/status/761411987578298368
HN comments are mostly quality when on topic, but toss out another discipline that people assume to understand with their common knowledge and.. well, here we are.
And,,, seriously though, this is why technology is NOT democratic by default, and why people must actively, forcefully work to democratize technology based social, community, and cultural infrastructure. If it can't be found outside of human civilization in a form ready to be picked up or stumbled over, and someone gets to it before you, they'll likely claim it for their own. Lame.