Say what?

I've recently been reminded of how individual companies and organisations not only carry their own individual corporate image and corporate culture, but also their own corporate parlance and turn of phrase.  But can this choice of parlance also be a reflection of the corporation which utters it?

Image copyright of www.savagechickens.com

When I joined my current employer, I was very quickly introduced to the concept of "bandwidth". No, I wasn't just a late starter when it came to getting online,  my colleagues would be commenting on their capacity to carry out a project within a particular timescale.  It's still used a lot today and I love this expression! It's completely digital. Which is good because Latitude is of course a digital company, and the company name is Latitude, and latitude is a bit like bandwith. Sort of. You get the idea.

Back when I worked in one private practice firm, I wasn't doing my job if I didn't have "shedloads" to do at any one moment in time.  A sub-conscious reflection of the name of the firm, Eversheds, I wonder?

Working in-house at a tour operator, colleagues were always polite enough to check if I was "snowed under" before asking me to do any work for them.  Actually, I was never snowed under, I always opted for MyTravel's winter sun holidays instead.  

At a different firm, not a day went by when I wasn't invited to a "catch-up".   No link between the company and the phrase here, just genuinely nice colleagues who had a lot to catch up on after a day spent "picking all of that low hanging fruit".

So, why have I recently been reminded of this link between parlance and organisation?  Well, my current employer is now part of a larger group. It has been for a couple of weeks.  Within that same time I've been asked a question which I've never been asked before.  On 3 separate occasions by 3 separate people. "So, if we cut you down the middle, what would we find?"

Gulp.

I'll continue to watch the link between companies and their choice of phrase more carefully, but for now I'm just relieved that my new colleagues want to get to know me so well! 

The In-House Lawyer Meets The Lawyer

Last Wednesday I received a call from The Lawyer magazine asking me for some time for an interview to appear in their in-house lawyer profile section.  I was over the moon to be asked to feature in this prestigious publication, and even more excited that they sent a photographer round to Latitude HQ for a photoshoot the very next day.  All very showbiz indeed.

The photoshoot co-incided with 1. stage 1 of a completion meeting at Latitude and 2. much more stressful than any completion meeting as I'm sure you'll all agree, a bad hair day, making it completely and utterly impossible to gaze into the distance with an air of nonchalance.

So huge thanks to The Lawyer magazine, and in particular Joanne Harris, for the write-up quirkily entitled Tweet Shop which appeared online just a few days later.

Winner: Follow up on my Shameless Plug Post

It never rains, but it pours; two blog posts in one night after the drought that was May.

So, following up on my Shameless Plug & Follow Up post where I asked you all to click on the link to my blog post for Latitude in the hope that if it was the post with the most hits on the Latitude blog for that month then I would win the prize for the monthly blogging competition......drum roll.......well thank you all very much indeed,  I won!  Even better, an earlier blog post which I'd penned for Latitude and which I'd cunningly linked to in the first (I don't work for a digital marketing agency for nothing) came second.  I won again!

I have donated my winnings from the competition to Save the Children.

Shameless Plug & Follow-up

A shameless plug for the blog post which I wrote for Latitude earlier this week, Google off the hook, but is anyone else left on it? following the judgement from the ECJ on the 3 Google Adwords cases referred to it from the French courts.  Please click on the link, because if I'm the employee with the most clicks on  the Latitude blog this month I could win the monthly blogging competition :-)

Plug over.

Now for the follow-up:

Obviously this isn't the result which trademark proprietors were hoping for, and since writing that post I've seen a number of reports in the blogosphere suggesting that enforcement costs for protecting brands online will rocket (see in particular this post from World Trademark Review).  We'll just have to wait and see if the price per click of branded keywords does increase, but I think to say that the costs of enforcement will rocket is perhaps a knee-jerk reaction because:

(a)  What this judgement does is further clarify what type of activity does and doesn't constitute trademark infringement, and clarity can only be a good thing for all parties concerned, and so there should be, per se, less infringement.  When we have the ruling in M&S v Interflora, we'll have even more clarity.

(b) Doubtless there will be some advertisers who take advantge of the ruling, but likewise there will be those who don't.  For instance, in terms of online advertising, some sectors are more sensitive to searches against generic keywords rather than branded keywords (eg "car insurance").  Indeed, individual advertisers also take their own ethical stance in whether or not they use competitor's trademarked terms as keywords in their own advertising campaigns.

(c) What trademark owners should consider are the other ways in which they can boost their online presence, such as through improved content (price per click is not the only factor which affects the placement of a sponsored ad) and organic search results.

Lots of analysis and views to digest still, I particularly enjoyed reading Eric Goldman's analysis of the ruling Google gets favourable ECJ opinion, but will it prove a hollow victory? and IPKat's summary of comments on the 3 cases.