Markets are supposed to be conversations, according to the Cluetrain. But does anyone own that conversation?
I started thinking about the question earlier in the week when the 37Signals Get Satisfaction spat kicked off. Who owns all those critical or positive questions about a brand anyway? IS it really Get Satisfaction? Or perhaps its Twitter? Here is Google selling Adwords to Intuit through Twitter? Confused yet?
Does RedMonk own mentions of RedMonk? I would said of course not! But what if that mention included a RedMonk logo? Ah that’s a little more difficult… then.
To be honest my problem with Get Satisfaction is a lot more prosaic, if certainly related to the issues above. You see there is a guy called Steve Ivy, nicknamed redmonk. When we launched the firm I decided that the nickname was Ok, given he trades under Monkinetic, although his URL is redmonk.net. Steve is a really nice guy. I have tried at various times since 2002 to stop calling himself redmonk, but its of course his decision.
That said as business and personal have increasingly intermingled on social networks, things are getting more and more uncomfortable. That is- Steve got @redmonk on twitter first, which is Ok. A little more annoying, when I first tried to use Get Satisfaction it quickly became apparent it wouldn’t work for us, because any perception and mention crawling engine was going to throw up an awful lot of false positives. It doesn’t help that Steve is interested in a lot of the same open source and development issues we are.
I think our RedMonk is bigger than Steve’s redmonk (well there are four of us after all!), and Google basically concurs, but the twitter thing does make me uncomfortable. You’re probably chuckling at this point – those guys at RedMonk think they are *so* smart, and they didn’t even get @redmonk…. well I am guilty as charged.
But nicknames, brands and tags are all converging. The whole notion of IP protection becomes ever more complicated. Our answer is to look for friendly ways to deal with stuff. Clearly many brands have a different approach.
A while back I said if markets are conversations then twitter is money. You can see why Facebook doesn’t want Google spidering its users’ sentiments. Twitter is more open, which is a powerful position, but also allows for embrace and extend tactics.
Don’t even get me started on the Terms of Service that allow these web apps to think they own what we say and do. But I am increasingly wondering whose conversation is it, and whose money?
monkchips says:
April 3, 2009 at 3:14 pm
whose conversation is it anyway? http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2009/04/03/whose-conversation-is-it-anyway/ [pimp tweet]
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TwitLinksRSS says:
April 3, 2009 at 3:41 pm
James Governor’s Monkchips » Whose Conversation Is It Anyway?: Markets are supposed to be conversati.. http://tinyurl.com/d4wvsl
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mrinal says:
April 3, 2009 at 3:47 pm
thought provoking post by by @re… no @monkchips 🙂 .. “Whose conversation is it anyway?” http://hex.io/jg9
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alexbarnett says:
April 3, 2009 at 3:53 pm
“if markets are conversations then twitter is money” – http://bit.ly/12JYoS – by @monckchips
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IanSkerrett says:
April 3, 2009 at 5:22 pm
nice post from @monkchips http://tinyurl.com/d4wvsl; he raises some important issues
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redmonk says:
April 3, 2009 at 7:33 pm
got seriously name-checked (and a bit bitch-slapped) by the other RedMonk (aka @monkchips): http://bit.ly/f2HGH
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redmonk says:
April 3, 2009 at 7:34 pm
re: http://bit.ly/f2HGH — some days i seriously consider dumping @redmonk everywhere for this very reason – but it’s personal to wife & me.
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satisfaction says:
April 3, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Perhaps the brouhaha this week has reopened the can of online ownership worms. “Whose Conversation Is It, Anyway?”: http://bit.ly/19vHG0
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cliffordx says:
April 3, 2009 at 7:53 pm
James Governor’s Monkchips » Whose Conversation Is It Anyway? http://cli.gs/4da3nt
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bthesingh says:
April 4, 2009 at 1:58 pm
If markets are conversations then twitter is money. http://tinyurl.com/d4wvsl
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Jeff says:
April 4, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Hi James. I think it is an interesting question – but I’m a little worried by how easily you dismiss the service provider’s ToS’s that claim ownership… they’re more accurate than most would like to believe.
The truth is that while you “own” whatever it is you write (at least in the US and other Berne Convention signatory nations), you can easily grant a license (of varying nature). So posting on FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace and even on some blog services (if you don’t host your own), could grant the service provider a very open license to whatever you write. So while you can retain “ownership”, the license could be perpetual – even if you remove your original writing.
But this is a different argument than name ownership – and gets even more tricky when you start talking about trademarks. And given the additional issue of you being in the UK and Steve in the US (and the fact that neither of you seems to have registered ANYTHING with regards to the use of the term redmonk), well, I’m supposing that’s because of your “answer is to look for friendly ways to deal with stuff.”
The reality though is that IP isn’t going anywhere – so if you don’t want to avail yourself of the currently available options, then you can’t complain too hard when something like this happens.
Hualani says:
April 4, 2009 at 5:49 pm
James Governor’s Monkchips » Whose Conversation Is It Anyway? http://tinyurl.com/d4wvsl
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Mrgareth says:
April 6, 2009 at 2:23 am
Reading and Tagging an interesting article by @monkchips on “who owns the conversation” : http://bit.ly/iGZUw
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labsji says:
April 6, 2009 at 10:25 am
Convergence of Brands, tags, nicknames.. @monkchips Whose Conversation Is It Anyway? http://bit.ly/f2HGH #bananapeel
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James Governor says:
April 6, 2009 at 11:45 am
Jeff- ToS are “more accurate”. i disagree. they are generally over-reaching, surprisingly ambiguous, and are rarely tested. Providers accept no liability, consumers suck it all up. Reminds me of a bailout. And while you say they are “accurate” – i don’t believe we have seen many legal test cases around IP ownership. If Facebook actively tried to claim ownership of one of my blogs, say, just because i posted something on its service I think they’d really struggle to make it stick.
often the ToS asserts over-arching rights not because the service actually wants to assert them, but because they are “necessary for running the service”. i have seen this patterns again and again and again. vendor is always surprised someone “read it like that.”
And finally I am clearly *not* complaining too hard. i wrote the piece because i think the issues are important. The question of redmonks was included to help explain the issue.
SavioRodrigues says:
April 6, 2009 at 5:07 pm
@monkchips a great post – and why there can be only one RedMonk — Whose Conversation Is It Anyway? http://bit.ly/f2HGH
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
James Governor’s Monkchips » Cloudforce 2009: On Salesforce and Crowd Sourcing by Cloud Sourcing says:
April 9, 2009 at 3:53 pm
[…] manager, mentioning a post I had recently written on the subject of customer influencer clouds, Whose Conversation Is It Anyway? Scott is very savvy and real time clouded me by simply saying: “I just read it.” All […]
monkchips says:
April 29, 2009 at 12:03 pm
@wendyslea how to be awesome: help weed out false positives (people vs businesses) http://bit.ly/VVZ3F got your @name from a @jowyang tweet
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
7 Years To Secure A Domain Name: a tale of web identity. Consolidating RedMonk for the Web Squared says:
November 27, 2009 at 9:39 pm
[…] Then Twitter came along. And Steven Ivy registered the username RedMonk. Before we did. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth from yours truly. But Steve had every right to register any name he wanted. Things got even worse when GetSatisfaction came along. You see GetSatisfaction is a web service that tracks mentions of your company, so you can offer customer service to the conversations around your brand. Its a place for people to talk about brands they’re interested in. It can be useful for corporate FAQs and so on. But “RedMonk” kept throwing up false positives. I wrote about the issue in a piece called Whose Conversation Is It Anyway. […]
Intellectual Property Issues in 2009 « NET(net), Inc. says:
May 12, 2010 at 3:10 pm
[…] in 2009 April 7, 2009, 9:32 am Filed under: trademark Prompted by an interesting post by James Governor on the subject of IP ownership of brands, names and even posts made through social networking sites […]