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“Please note, the hashtag is for our paying advertisers”
- sharemywin 10y agoone way to get people talking about your company/magazine.
- lostlogin 10y agoIf 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.
- minimaxir 10y agoSome 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.
- jbob2000 10y agoNo, 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. They got everyone, hook, line, and sinker.
- mattdeboard 10y agohttp://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- imron 10y agoIt's not being attributed to malice though, it's being attributed to ingenuity. I agree with your parent post, this has been done intentionally to get people to use #shopedmond.
- mark-r 10y agoHow can it make the hashtag more valuable if 99% of the traffic has nothing to do with their business? They're drowned out in the noise now.
- abcd_f 10y agoAny publicity is a good publicity. Unless it's an obituary.
- vonmoltke 10y ago> the theory that any-publicity-is-good-publicity 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.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThe 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.
- erdevs 10y agoDoes anyone have a quick backgrounder on what is going on here?
- celticninja 10y agoseems 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.
- nl 10y agoPretty sure "he" is female - or at least the contact for their advertising and social media sales is female - or at least was in 2014[1] [1] https://issuu.com/edmondactive/docs/edmondactive_janfeb2014 https://issuu.com/edmondactive/docs/edmondactive_janfeb2014 (pg 3. Note down the bottom of that page they claim the trademark to #shopedmond"
- celticninja 10y agoAs gender isn't an issue here, that I used he/him is irrelevant to the discussion. It wasn't meant as sexism.
- celticninja 10y agoAs gender isn't an issue here, that I used he/him is irrelevant to the discussion. It wasn't meant as sexism.
- celticninja 10y agoAs gender isn't an issue here, that I used he/him is irrelevant to the discussion. It wasn't meant as sexism.
- celticninja 10y ago
- Vanit 10y agoReminds me of the sites that tried to assert that you needed permission to link to them. GG your page ranking
- rictic 10y agoBaseless 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.
- jrochkind1 10y agoYou 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.
- jahewson 10y agoI 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.
- jrochkind1 10y agopeople unclear on the concept.
- gargravarr 10y agoSome people just have to learn the hard way what saying such a thing on Twitter will lead to.
- Overtonwindow 10y agoThis 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.
- criddell 10y agoTrademark, not copyright.
- aaron695 10y agoCould someone please TL;DR me a story about this company? 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?
- drewcrawford 10y agoI 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.
- libeclipse 10y agoWell, they're on the front page of HN. I think they won guys.
- astrodust 10y agoHash-tag Streisand Effect.
- basseq 10y agoNote that the IOC is trying the same thing with #Rio2016 #TeamUSA and other hashtags. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36915565 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36915565
- dhimes 10y agoFrom your linked page: "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."
- darkarmani 10y agoWhat? I've been saying TeamUSA since high school when playing friendly games against people from other countries. How can you possibly trademark that? Rio2016 is also a little insane. I guess no one else is going to rio in 2016.
- Spivak 10y ago> What? I've been eating Apples since I was a child. How could you possibly trademark that? You're falling into the same trap as some a few others -- a generic term doesn't necessarily disqualify it from being trademarked.
- soared 10y agoWell 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.
- xg15 10y agoNote 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. [1] https://twitter.com/EdmondActive/status/761406212122431488 https://twitter.com/EdmondActive/status/761406212122431488
- Karunamon 10y agoTheir 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. So what if they're "right"? They still lost.
- sosborn 10y agoA friend of mine always had a great saying: "You are dead right but you are dead."
- TeMPOraL 10y agoEvery 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"...
- stonemetal 10y agoWhy 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.
- the_watcher 10y agoTHere'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.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoOk, that was hilarious.
- someotheruser1 10y agoWhen 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"
- DanBC 10y agoWere you ever going to advertise with whoever the fuck EdmondActive is?
- DanBC 10y agoThere's a nice writeup of the law here: http://www.socialmedialawbulletin.com/2016/07/can-you-trademark-a-hashtag/ http://www.socialmedialawbulletin.com/2016/07/can-you-tradem... 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 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/761416672167157761 https://twitter.com/EdmondActive/status/761411987578298368 https://twitter.com/EdmondActive/status/761411987578298368
- lettercarrier 10y agoSeems 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
- soared 10y agoThe 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.
- xbmcuser 10y agoWas a nice piece of social marketing and engineering. His hashtag is trending now.
- JustUhThought 10y agoI 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.
- daemonhunter 10y agoSigh, as a great sign of a flawed system you can own a trademark for something as simple as shopping in a city. Our system is _FLAWED_.