Yes­ter­day, we attended a sem­i­nar in Utrecht, organ­ised by CMS Derks Star Bus­man and WBI Web­ex­perts. I believe the 50 or so par­tic­i­pants which had taken the time to come, was an after­noon well spent.  The speak­ers included Mr Hoorne­man, Sienen and Hagen from CMS, and Tim Pel­lens from WSI.

The topic was social media, and we got a good and infor­ma­tive run­down from WSI on inter­net and social media trends, and the opti­mi­sa­tion of the vis­i­bil­ity and reach strat­egy within the ever-changing bat­tery of social media tools and plat­forms. A few inter­est­ing stats on inter­net use in the Nether­lands, that were new to me in any case:

• 12,2 mil­lion Dutchies (out of a total pop­u­la­tion of 16.6 mil­lion) are online at least 1 hour per day.
  
• The fastest grow­ing Dutch online pop­u­la­tion demo­graphic is women aged 20 — 40, and they engage increas­ingly in.… gam­ing!
• E-commerce cur­rently gen­er­ates 4 bil­lion € in annual sales in the Netherlands.
• Social net­work Hyves is gigan­tic in the Nether­lands, with around 6,7 mil­lion Dutch mem­bers. That is some­thing like  40 % of the entire pop­u­la­tion! Fastest grow­ing cat­e­gory is women between 30 and 50 years of age.

A large part of the dis­cus­sion revolved around the legal ins and outs of using social media for mar­ket­ing pur­poses. Per­haps not the sex­i­est top­ics to spend time on as a pas­sion­ate social media mar­ke­teer. But of course oh-so-important to be aware of: bet­ter to be safe than sorry and find your­self in court fac­ing a com­peti­tor suing your pants off because you used their trade mark name wrongly.

A few insights:

• There is a lot of legal buzz at the moment around the use of third party trade­marks in Google Adwords and as key­words online. The Euro­pean Court of Jus­tice has recently indi­cated that Google has the right to pro­pose and sell Adwords includ­ing 3rd party trade­marks. A French court, how­ever, recently fined eBay €80,000 for hav­ing used Dior as a key­word. This is clearly  jurispru­dence in the making.…
• A rule of thumb is, that you may use some­one else’s trade­mark in your blog or on your site, if it is for refer­ral, for [fair] com­par­a­tive adver­tise­ments and as long as it made abun­dantly clear that you do not sell or rep­re­sent the brand.
• The reg­is­tra­tion of a domain name in itself gives no auto­matic IP rights and is not com­pa­ra­ble to a trade­mark in the ‘offline’ world.  This said, you may of course not cyber­squat and reg­is­ter a domain name that already belongs to some­one else. So start in the right order: secure it by duly reg­is­ter­ing your trade­mark first.
• The new Dutch leg­is­la­tion on data pro­tec­tion, which amongst other things for­bids Dutch com­pa­nies to send any kind of email to cus­tomers or other com­pa­nies with­out prior explicit per­mis­sion to com­mu­ni­cate by email, is one of the strictest in the world. Hor­rey.…. it cer­tainly does not make life eas­ier when one wants to design mar­ket­ing cam­paigns., I can tell you that much. It also applies to Dutch com­pa­nies com­mu­ni­cat­ing with per­sons or com­pa­nies out­side of the Netherlands.

That a law­firm offers such a sem­i­nar for free is of course great ser­vice.  So — here­with my offi­cial thanks! I learned a lot!

It also goes to show that they believe, that there will be many com­pa­nies out there, includ­ing some of those present that day in the room, who are going to make mis­takes along the way and end up need­ing legal defence in this area. Or feel that they need to attack a com­peti­tor to defend their position.

And no doubt many of us will.… and hav­ing shown that they are a trusted hand to turn to if and when that hap­pens, I am sure they will end up earn­ing back the cost of speak­ers, hand­outs, pens, mini-mints and cof­fee, drinks and chips.

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