Can You Own a Twitter Hashtag?
Should you be able to own the Twitter hashtag with your company’s name? This is a question that keeps coming up in the branding world. We are used to seeing the Promoted Products tags at the top of our Twitter searches, but these are increasingly being used to edge in on the competition. For example, HP recently began purchasing space on the #apple, #mac, and #dell hashtags. This is raising concerns about copyrights and their applications on social networking sites.
We are already used to companies purchasing certain phrases. For example, the Washington Post purchased #elections and Target purchases #BlackFriday. However, neither of these are proprietary phrases the way #apple and #dell are. The main question is: should Twitter permanently sell certain hashtags and phrases so that companies can protect their brand? More important, should they offer companies that own these trademarks the opportunity to purchase them before they are put up on the general market? Should a company even have to purchase the right to their own copyrighted name and phrases?
Apple and Mac are both trademarked by Apple, so purchasing spots using these phrases is rather a low blow. Users should be able to go to the Apple store when they type in these phrases; instead, they are taken to the HP one. This creates a confusing situation, one that legal trademarks and copyrights were created to prevent. The only remedy would be to permanently give ownership of the hashtags to the companies who already own the phrase. However, this would cut into Twitter’s income stream substantially while infringing on other companies’ rights to reach out to potential customers.
Another issue is that many trademarks are rather generic. There are many different kinds of apple—not just the technology company, but the type that you eat, Fiona Apple, and even the Big Apple. The same goes for Mac. Who would be offered first dibs on a term like that? Unfortunately, many trademarks present the same challenge. On the other hand, advertising on a competitor’s territory—even if nominally legal—is unlikely to win customers. If you are looking for an Apple and HP pops up, it will only be an annoyance.
Why do twitter tags matter? Because they are becoming a huge part of the American retail landscape. Americans talk about their purchases, and more and more they are doing this via their favorite social networking platforms. This year out of 281,000 Black Friday tweets analyzed by researchers, around 156,000 were about Walmart. If one store can garner this much online interest, you can imagine how many tweets about retail in general were sent that day. Twitter and other social networking websites present the greatest branding and copyrighting challenge of our day, and offer the greatest rewards as well.
Twitter is still relatively new to the marketing game, so they will likely have to rethink and modify their plan several times before they come up with a solution that is both lucrative and fair to everyone involved. Until then, you can expect hashtags to get weirder and weirder as every company with the income battles for the most used terms.
