Jeremiah Owyang discusses the issue of competitors running ads that include trademarked brand keywords in their ads on Google. I wrote a post about competitors placing competitors' keywords in their Google Adwords ads back in March of 2008. Jeremiah received a tweet from Bryan Person that competitors were including his company's trademark keywords in their ads.
What's really interesting about this post is that several of the competitors have reconsidered their actions and stopped running ads that included the LiveWorld brand name. I think this is a good example of marketers taking some more time to think through the issues once the community highlights a practice that perhaps really shouldn't be done. That's the strength that comes from the building social media communities, we really can change behavior through discussion and debate in ways that were not possible when everyone did not have the ability to publish and post.
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