Jul 8th, 2008 | Google, IBM, Linguistics, Many Eyes, Visualization | 3 Comments
Two years ago, the news that Google was going to make available the largest collection of n-grams to the global research community that had ever been compiled sparked a lot of interest. I was among those who immediately ordered those six DVDs… and ever since they have been resting dutifully on a shelf in my office, collecting dust and reminding me that I need to bring them into a more accessible format. Alas, so many things to do, so little time.
Something led me to look for information on that corpus this morning and I came across this. Sadly, the link to Chris Harrison’s site no longer seems to work, but when I saw his visualization I immediately thought of Many Eyes.
My reasoning goes a little something like this:
Google N-gram corpus hosted on Google Palimpsest servers + IBM’s Many Eyes = Fantastic web-based tool for linguists
To elaborate: Google has a gigantic database of word collocations that can be used as a baseline for all sorts of interesting analysis, but you can’t really do any of these things unless you have a user interface and enough computing juice to sift through almost 100 gigabytes of text data on the fly. On the other hand, solutions like Many Eyes are amazing, but currently there’s no way you can use it with a really big data set like the n-gram corpus and therefore the research utility is limited.
But it must be possible somehow to bring together
- the data to analyze
- the computing power required and
- the user interface needed to allow a non-technical person to interact with the data
and to put the whole thing on the Web. It’s Google’s stated intention to host data for us and they are the owner of the n-gram dataset, so I can’t imagine there being any licensing issues. And, as if to put a cherry on that sundae, here’s the announcement of a joint project by IBM, Google and the NSF to do exactly that kind of stuff. Put the 6 DVDs on a cloud, throw in a tweaked version of Many Eyes (think the word tree vis with a few extras) and construction grammarians everywhere will absolutely love it.
What do you think?
Jun 2nd, 2008 | Corporate Blogging, Definitions, Google, Research, Style | 1 Comment
I’ve just skimmed over this interesting post by Ron Ploof about the challenges of corporate blogging.
Here’s one point in the piece that caught my attention in particular:
3. Being conversational is unnatural:
Being conversational is unnatural in business communications because we’ve been taught NOT to do it. Communication specialists are used to writing “Press Releases” and marketing web pages. The good news is that outside of work, employees are very good conversationalists, so they already know how to do it, they just need to break some of their Old Media habits. Training works very well in this area. Lastly, companies cannot forget the most important ingredient of a corporate blog — transparency. Corporate blogs are conversational and transparent, and therefore should NEVER be used to spew traditional marcom drivel.
I have been thinking about the style of blogs and corporate blogs in particular for almost two years now. The persistent chant ‘blogs are conversations’ and ‘conversational good, business-speak bad’ has a tendency to drive the professional linguist in me nuts, not because I don’t agree with these popular ideas, but because I keep wondering what exactly conversational means and why it is unequivocally regarded as ‘better’.
Now, as I am gradually approaching the completion of my thesis, I think can give a carefully weighed answer to that question.
Blogs are conversations? Partly yes, partly no
Firstly, when bloggers talk about ‘conversational’ what exactly do they mean?
Real-life conversations between human beings use many expressions that depend on the situational context to be understood. Things like that guy standing right there (so-called deictic expressions), false starts (And I was…. we didn’t go… No, Sue and I didn’t go to the meeting) and fillers (We need to… umm… discuss this in more detail) abound in face-to-face talk. Conversations also typically contains a lot of signals that serve purely to confirm and validate what your communicative partner is saying (things like yeah, okay, gotcha, right, uh-huh, nodding etc) and indicate your stance and social relationship. While conversations in TV shows, plays, novels and so forth are fast, witty and fluent, real conversations are often anything but - it’s just that we’re very good at ignoring all the noise they contain. We subconsciously filter out most of the static.
Blogs are obviously different in that blog entries are planned and not spontaneous (forget all the cutesy rhetoric associated with the word spontaneous for a moment - I use it to simply mean ‘instantly expressed’). Many bloggers, and most certainly the majority of corporate bloggers will read a post they have written thoroughly before publishing it. In the case of marketing and PR-oriented blogs and with executive blogs such as that of Jonathan Schwartz it is safe to assume that an entire team of communications professionals reads, discusses and edits posts collaboratively before they are published. There is planning and polishing involved, none of which is possible in real-time conversation.
So it’s not that aspect of blogs that makes us think of face-to-face conversations. What we associate with interpersonal communication is the interactive nature of blogs - in other words, that they enable a dialog between blogger and reader. Our reasoning goes: ‘I can respond to what someone writes in their blog, so it is basically like a conversation’. The other aspect is language; the content and style of writing that is associated with blogs. Note that point - blogs are written, not spoken language, which means that none of the ‘noise’ described above in occurs in them. Many things characteristic for spoken language never occur in blogs, especially not corporate ones.
Subjective as conversational
So apart from interactivity, what else is conversation-like about (corporate) blogs?
Have a look at this excerpt from One Louder, the blog of Microsoft staffing manager Heather Hamilton:
I’m not sure what has gotten into me other than the fact that I am happier than I have been for a VERY long time. It’s funny how sometimes things can just fall into place. The changes that I wanted to have happen at work happened without me doing much about it (other than saying “this is what I want”). I have finally started to spend some weekend time relaxing (and hanging with friends). And I am starting to believe what Eckhart Tolle says about coincidences not happening; it’s all for a reason (and with most of my life, I get the reasons for even some of the unpleasant things happening). Example: last week my manager and I were talking about me needing to travel to one of our dev centers. She recommended Ireland (oh yeah, I am totally doing that!) and I said “why don’t we have a dev center in Amsterdam? I really want to go there.” Then this week, I got an e-mail inviting me to speak at a conference in Amsterdam. How ’bout that? I’ve decided not to question what forces (if any) could be invovled with things like that happening. I’m just going to enjoy it.
In addition to business-related topics, Heather frequently writes about her personal feelings, thoughts and experiences in her blog, something that I’ve found to be typical of what I call ‘personal company blogs’. Such blogs are written by just one person, have a clearly visible reference to the blogger on the front page (name, photo) and are often part of a larger company blog hub (MSDN, in this case). In contrast to personal company blogs, team company blogs are usually about a specific product, issue or segment of the company and have several authors. I’ve found that writing about personal thoughts and feelings is less common in team blogs, largely because the topical focus of the blog tends to override personal concerns. By contrast, personal company blogs tend to be understood by their owners as diaries or journals where work-related subjects are integrated with personal thoughts.
Now, keep in mind how Heather writes and then have a look at this very interesting research on business English, conducted by Mike Nelson, an applied linguist at the University of Turku. Read Mike’s short article in the Guardian for a summary of his findings.
The kind of language used in corporate contexts (pre-blogging) is fairly strictly focused on a fixed set of topics. To quote Mike:
The world of business found in real life language is a limited one made up of business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, places of business, time, modes of communication and vocabulary concerned with technology. The language found was surprisingly positive, with very few negative words featuring at all. It was also found to be dynamic and action-orientated and non-emotive.
What Mike found via his large database of language samples from real-life business settings was that corporate language largely centers on things associated with business, namely business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, places of business, time et cetera and that these things are generally presented positively (business is about getting things done, not about being self-reflexive or critical). Finally, the subjective emotions of stakeholders aren’t really very important - private matters don’t feature into corporate discourse in any significant way.
Now compare that to how Heather writes. It’s a world of difference.
In posts marked with the ‘personal blogging’ tag, Heather writes about aspects of everyday life that we are all familiar with: buying furniture and cleaning out the garage, cheering for a sports team and experiencing a blackout. Not everything is always positive - there are ups and downs. Heather’s language can certainly be described as ‘emotive’ or ‘involved’, not because it is necessarily always highly emotional, but because it is concerned with inner processes more than with actions. All of this is obviously in stark contrast to what language in most other corporate contexts looks like.
There are a number of reasons why a ‘conversational’ style in that sense of the word is typical for both non-corporate and personal company blogs and why I expect it to have an influence on how institutions communicate, present themselves and are perceived in the future. I’ll focus on three basic pillars: audience, content and style.
Who you talk to
Blogs are a part of the Internet and the Internet provides virtually anyone with near-universal access to information. This may seem like a truism, but it has significant implications. Whereas before groups of stakeholder would be targeted individually and the flow of information was highly controlled, this is no longer the case in a networked world. A careful examination of the Google-Sicko story reveals a case of audience underfitting, i.e. a company employee addressing a specific audience but effectively reaching a much broader readership (and, in this case, not with a positive result).
The problem encountered is the extreme reach and transparency of online publishing. Because we are used to addressing either individuals or select communities of people, suddenly reaching a diffuse, invisible and potentially vast audience is not always easy to handle. This is especially problematic when you talk about people who are also your readers (see the Google example).
What you talk about
One notable aspect of Heather’s blog (and many others like it) is how openly it presents personal thoughts, experiences and feelings to readers. This is not necessarily done just for the audience. It seems that many personal company bloggers, though quite aware that their blogs are public, write partly to record their thoughts for themselves much in the same way that diarists do. The blog is a chronicle of what the blogger has thought, felt and done over time, both personally and professionally. Not every personal detail imaginable is presented, but there is no strict (and artificial) separation of personal and professional topics. Independently of how bloggers conceptualize audience, the effect of sharing personal information is that it lays the foundation for relationship-building.
Being told the subjective impressions, thoughts and emotions of another human being is almost inevitably relevant to us because we value such social information very highly. Knowing personal aspects of someone’s life brings us closer to them and establishes ties which are the foundation of any interpersonal relationship. This is especially pivotal on the Internet where all voices are detached from the individuals who use them. Social information enables us to establish a relationship with someone whom we have never met, because what we know about someone allows us to draw an increasingly complete picture of what kind of person they are.
Social information as a universal currency is especially valuable in a globalized and networked world, because exchanging it builds trust and without trust the foundation for other interactions is lacking.
How you say it
There is a persistent belief that jargon, technical language and other forms of special purpose lingo exist purely to irritate those of us who don’t understand it. That’s not true quite true though - medical language or legalese may have that effect on people who aren’t doctors or lawyers, but among those who speak them these varieties are readily understood and used for plausible reasons. Jargon allows us to
- delineate membership in an expert community (techies, lawyers, bloggers…)
- describe aspects of our work/community/culture/shared experience with more perceived precision than ’standard’ language allows
In other words, we often feel that what we want to say is said more effectively when we use a specialized vocabulary developed to express it. While this is unproblematic as long as we are talking to others who share our knowledge, this instantly turns into an issue when we address a broader audience - which is inevitably the case with a blog. All of a sudden, use of a specialized terminology makes us aloof, arrogant and out of touch. Audience underfitting once again leads to problems, this time in stylistic terms.
Finally, ‘conversational’ in stylistic terms also implies the use of colloquialisms, figures of speech and other expressive elements which are typically found in spoken conversation. The effect of such devices is again that they allow blogger and audience to conceptualize the blog as a speech situation, amplifying feelings of solidarity and familiarity.
What ‘conversational’ can mean
To summarize, ‘conversational’ can mean a range of things when applied to blogs. Among them are:
- interactivity - it can describe the dialogic structure of blogs and the possibility to respond to contributions
- speaker and audience - it can describe the discourse situation that the blog creates on a technical level and the resulting possibility for the blogger to refer to himself/herself (”I”) and address his/her readers (”you”)
- content - it can describe a focus on personal and everyday topics which are familiar to a broad audience and create a feeling of solidarity and familiarity with the blogger
- style - it can describe the avoidance of jargon and technical language (due to its audience-restrictiveness) in favor of expressions that evoke spoken language and real-life conversation
As always, feedback is appreciated.
Aug 2nd, 2007 | Cisco, Corporate Blogging, Google, Policy Blogging, Verizon | No Comments
Forget about summer of code, this year something else is at the top of Google’s list.
One thing that’s interesting about Google’s role in the Open Access wireless debate is how they are communicating their intent to invest $4.6 billion: via their blog. Or, more specifically, via their public policy blog. That appears to be a new format, one that I can see having quite a bit of potential with the FT500. I can find two other instances of that type that explicitly have policy in the name: Cisco and Verizon - companies that are, like Google, quite likely to have an idea or two when it comes to networks, access and legislation. And when you think about it, it all makes perfect sense. You’re a large corporation, you want to address a specific clientèle (e.g. lawmakers) and you want to make sure that people know where you stand on certain issues. Why wait for some ailing tech publication to report when you can start you own blog. Why make it “just” a general-purpose public relations blog when you can be much more specific, with different blogs for different stakeholders? Even better, you can get rid of cable news while you’re at it and have your CEO explain your strategy on YouTube, not only to a bunch of lawmakers but to anyone who wants to listen (and given that it’s Google that we’re talking about, that might be a few people). It’s an extremely convenient way to make sure that you reach those that you want to talk to (and influence) and I’d be surprised if those three stay the only blogs of their kind for long.
Corporate social responsibility, recruiting, knowledge management, customer service… it seems there’s a virtual kaleidoscope of functions a company blog can have, and people invent new forms all the time.
Now, guess in which area of use corporate blogs look least promising (well, at least from my point of view).
In the one most of us initially thought of when the term “corporate blog” was coined.
Advertising.
Edit: Danny Sullivan has posted a very nice summary of what Google has been doing with the policy blog so far.
Jul 17th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Google, Opinion | 3 Comments
I’ve decided to take this long comment from my previous post on the Google-Sicko incident and republish it here, mainly because comments tend to be overlooked and it may be interesting to some readers. Please note that I have no knowledge about the identity of “Mike G” and what he says about the way Google has dealt with this issue may be accurate or complete speculation (where are your sources, Mike?). Frankly, I have very mixed feelings about giving a public forum to anonymous voices (especially considering the kind of mudslinging involved) but the point made about the responsibility of senior staff at Google in regards to the incident is valid.
Just take this with a grain of salt.
And here are two short responses that I wrote after receiving “Mike’s” comment.
My comment number 1:
Thanks for your interesting comment. It makes perfect sense to me that the problems that have arisen can’t really be blamed purely on Mrs. Turner, but that those who gave the her the assignment and approved it dropped the ball. I still think there’s a stylistic problem there (well, or an “audience design” one - it’s a sales pitch that reached the wrong people), but you are right that it isn’t exactly fair from her point of view.
Strange though, communication is usually very well handled at Google and they excel at not sounding like marketers. This is clearly an exception.
My comment number 2:
(quote Mike G) “Get with the program: you work for an advertising platform company. Your free healthcare and free lunch come from advertising revenue. Wake up and smell the words “public company.” Google isn’t a start-up anymore.”
True, it certainly isn’t, but it’s a company that has a lot to loose in terms of image. The question is: why would they want to even try appeal to pharma companies in this way? Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that they want the ad revenue, but don’t they get that anyway, without the sleazy, reputation-damaging sales pitch? I’m not saying that they aren’t about a profit, but this whole story seems anything but beneficial to their bottom line, evil or no evil.
I should add that I don’t support any of the seemingly internal finger-pointing going on here (and obviously I am not affiliated with Google). It’s true that Turner has taken an awful lot of criticism for something that must have been approved by other people. On the other hand, if it has your name under (or above it) you are responsible for the content. Blogs are highly individual channels of communication and as long as you have a choice you should think twice before playing human shield for your company.
All that being said, let’s not overrate the whole issue. Given the attention span of the blogosphere, I’m confident no one will remember any of this a month from now.
Jul 12th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Debbie Weil, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, Johnson & Johnson | 4 Comments
I’m sitting in the lobby of Harbour Centre in lovely Vancouver, watching a huge cruise ship leave port and occasionally glancing at my feed reader. Here’s some reading material I’ve discovered today that’s worth sharing.
- Over at oreilly.com, Nat Torkington has an interesting post up about the Lauren Turner/Google incident.
- BrandWeek’s Marc Monseau Jim Edwards compares Johnson & Johnson’s new blog to Pravda.
EDIT July 12th: Adriana points out that Marc Monseau is of course the blogger doing JNJBTW, not the author of the Brandweek piece about that blog (that’s Jim Edwards). Thanks for correcting me, Adriana!
- Finally, Allan Jenkins suggests that Debbie Weil is astroturfing for alliConnect, a new blog meant to promote a weight loss product sold by GlaxoSmithKline.
I’d comment more extensively, but I’m still a bit too jetlagged, plus a long day of conferencing lies behind me. Funny coincident though, all these health-related blogs appearing almost at once, and interesting that they all appear to have their issues. Is it an exaggeration to say that the health care sector has its problems with blog transparency? I’d be interested in your opinion, especially if you’ve worked in that area.
Jul 9th, 2007 | Blogosphere, Corporate Blogging, Google, Linguistics, Style | 12 Comments
(Edit: this post by Teresa Valdez Klein on the subject is also interesting.)
The tumult over the whole affair has been impossible to miss. A little over a week ago, Lauren Turner, a health care marketer at Google, wrote a blog entry in which she criticized Michael Moore’s new movie Sicko for its allegedly unfair depiction of health care companies. The piece was posted in Google’s new Health Advertising Blog and led to an outcry. Many in the blogosphere saw Turner’s recommendation to insurance companies - buy ads from Google to fix your image problems - as a sleazy and manipulative form of marketing (samples: this post by ZDNet’s Dan Farber and this bit by Mike Abundo calling for Turner to be fired). The company reacted with two meta posts, one by Turner, explaining that the views expressed in her initial post were purely her own and a second one in Google’s main corporate blog that also sought to douse the flames. Since the incident made Slashdot it can be considered a fairly bad moment for Google’s PR.
Most comments that I’ve read deal with the question of accountability - whose opinion is expressed in an official blog and where do we draw the line between personal opinion and the company’s official stance?
While I also want to deal with that question, my impression is that Turner’s (and thus Google’s) mistake is not firstly the opinion expressed in the post - that Sicko is biased and treats health care companies unfairly - but failing to understand the communicative situation in which the exchange takes place. Turner manifests a fairly stunning lack of knowledge and sensitivity when it comes to blog sociology and that is why the piece caused such an uproar.
Let me elaborate, using several quotes from the post:
Lights, camera, action: the healthcare industry is back in the spotlight. (Not that it ever left the stage.) Next week, Michael Moore’s documentary film, Sicko, will start playing in movie theaters across America.
The New York Times calls Sicko a “cinematic indictment of the American health care system.” The film is generating significant buzz and is sure to spur a lively conversation about health coverage, care, and quality in America. While legislators, litigators, and patient groups are growing excited, others among us are growing anxious. And why wouldn’t they? Moore attacks health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst. Moore’s film portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show healthcare’s interest in patient well-being and care.
These are the first two paragraphs of Turner’s piece and careful reading quickly reveals several interesting things. Firstly, the style is very journalesque. The lights, camera, action-enumeration in the first sentence could also be from a movie review or some other traditional journalistic text type (e.g. an editorial).
A slight shift occurs with the first instance of a personal pronoun (us). While the referent of the pronoun is at least somewhat ambiguous, it appears to be what could be called the ‘universal we‘ that Turner uses - legislators, litigators, and patient groups are part of the American public, as are others among us. The referent of others is named a bit later: health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies are worried about the way the movie depicts them. The important detail here is that Turner does not place the two groups equally for away from herself. She could have simply written others are growing anxious or something similar, but by inserting among us she has placed herself (and arguably her employer) in direct proximity to her potential clients in the health care business. Of course that placement is quite deliberate - she wants to sell ads to these companies, after all - but it soon becomes clear why it is also highly problematic.
Sound familiar? Of course. The healthcare industry is no stranger to negative press. A drug may be a blockbuster one day and tolled as a public health concern the next. News reporters may focus on Pharma’s annual sales and its executives’ salaries while failing to share R&D costs. Or, as is often common, the media may use an isolated, heartbreaking, or sensationalist story to paint a picture of healthcare as a whole. With all the coverage, it’s a shame no one focuses on the industry’s numerous prescription programs, charity services, and philanthropy efforts.
I think you’ll agree that the entire paragraph is essentially a flowery declaration of love for the health care industry. Now, this isn’t surprising per se (again, this is a sales pitch), but the lack of balance is still noteworthy (the nasty press vs. the friendly insurance companies). But wait, there’s more.
Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them?
Note that here the pronominal references change. We becomes Google and the more distant our clients is replaced by you / your brand. Why is this significant?
Because the post starts out with no clear speaker and referent. There is no “I”, as in “I want to express my views on Sicko and the health care industry today” and no “you” as in “Dear John, how are you ?”. The latter -that there is no clear referent - is perfectly normal for a blog, but the former is unusual. More importantly, these roles are only clearly assigned in the last two paragraphs.
We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.
The pronominal reference at this point is clearly we = Google, you = health care companies. In other words, this is a message from Google to companies in that industry and while other people may also be reading it they are of no concern to the author. When a third party is introduced into the text (the public, later users), it is treated as though it were not a part of the exchange. Apart from pronominal use there are other signature characteristics of the text type that Mrs. Turner had in mind when writing this: verbs such as act, educate, promote, connect and help are indicting, as is the need to tart up nouns adjectivally (relevant websites, ever-expanding content network etc).
If you’re interested in learning more about issue management campaigns or about how we can help your company better connect its assets online, email us. We’d love to hear from you! Setting up these campaigns is easy and we’re happy to share best practices.
This is the equivalent of telling Bob that you think Mary is fat… while she is standing next to you. The public that needs to be educated is the elephant in the room and it doesn’t like to be talked down to. Turner appears to be unaware of this however. She seems to either assume that only potential clients will read the blog and that her pitch will work with them, or (even worse) that the gullible and asinine public will read it but not be offended.
The moral of the story is simple: you should anticipate that your blog is a public forum, no matter how specialized and in-group it may seem. Corporate bloggers should also forget most of what they know about the language of marketing. Certain linguistic tropes (like the aforementioned super-dupering of products via excessive use of adjectives) are recognized immediately and have a lot of potential for negative interpretation.
Delivering a sales pitch like this through a blog is bad enough, priding yourself with how effectively your employer can manipulate the public opinion for the right price is… well, I believe in American English it is called effing stupid. The problem is further aggravated by the fact that Turner’s claim - this is my opinion, not Google’s - is extremely weak.
In all but the last sentence we is the personal pronoun of choice, and that we clearly refers to the company. Obviously, Google as a corporate entity cannot have an opinion, but what is posted in an official corporate blog will understandably be interpreted as noted and accepted by someone further up the ladder (and it seems unlikely that there was no monitoring in Turner’s case).
Not understanding blog stylistics is at least a part of Turner’s failure. She has applied a language common in one context to a completely different and inappropriate one and the result is a bit like someone telling a bad joke aloud at a funeral. Clarifying that your views are your own by using I instead of the collective company we is a decent start.
Sep 19th, 2006 | Adobe, Google, Linguistics | No Comments
Though it’s somewhat off-topic, I can’t resist to discuss a little gem of corporate grammar prescriptivism here that I recently discovered on Adobe’s website. Believe me, most of the “rules” put forth there are enough to give any seasoned grammarian an aneurysm, not so much because of what they forbid, but because they seriously confuse grammatical categories.
Let’s have a look.
Trademarks are not nouns.
They most certainly are. Just look at this sentence from Adobe’s main page:
Download Adobe Reader and Flash Player.
Note that it would have to read Download Adobe® Reader® software and Flash® Player® software if Adobe followed its own rules.
Trademarks are proper adjectives and should be followed by the generic terms they describe.
Ouch. Trademarks are certainly not proper adjectives. It’s not terribly difficult to figure out where the confusion comes from, though. Take the phrase New York pizza - would you describe New York as an adjective in this example? Hardly. Adjectives often modify nouns, as in the white bunny, a happy student etc. But that doesn’t mean that anything that can modify a noun actually is an adjective.
We are also warned about abbreviating trademarks and using them as “slang terms”. The two sentences used as examples of slang actually manifest what linguists call conversion, the process of coining a new word by copying an existing form from another word class (see the etymology of “to edit” for the description of a related process, the back formation).
Now, of course there’s a sane and absolutely pragmatic reason for this fixation on the “proper” use of trademarks. Companies fear what’s called genericide, the association of a brand name with a generic object, as opposed to one specific product. The result of genericide can be the loss of a trademark, though this does not occur often.
A certain degree of generification is basically unavoidable if your product dominates the market and/or describes a new thing or activity (hoover became generic in the U.K. for those reasons). Photoshop I’m sorry, Adobe® Photoshop® software has a similar dominance in the market and is used for an activity that wasn’t popular or terribly common before its advent.
Funny thing is, the good folks at Adobe seem to have trouble following their own advice, probably because “photoshopping something” seems and awful lot more efficient than “using Adobe® Photoshop® software to manipulate images” (we humans like our language short and sweet).
Have a look here (last sentence) and here (in quotes). Looks like John Nack’s primer on trademark misuse was in vain. How do I know? I googled it.
(For an in-depth linguistic assessment by a real expert, read Geoffrey K. Pullum’s post on Language Log.)
A few points:1. Google clearly has not communicated to its employees how to blog. Multiple people were involved in approving the blog entry, some senior on the PR team. They messed up, not Turner. The entry was an *assignment.* From what I know, the messaging to Turner was to speak to healthcare advertisers. It was a sales pitch. Who even knows if the message was Turner’s view. It could easily not be. Remember, it was a sales pitch assignment. Perhaps the advertising teams should not be pitching on blogs, but that does not make it Turner’s responsibility to decide that. Seems like a more senior problem. As for her second post, it was obviously crafted by PR. It’s not like it just appeared on a Sunday morning at 9am because she thought, hey, I’d like to get up early on a weekend. Advertising as democratic…sounds like something straight from PR.I’d love to know who’s responsible for reviewing all the blogs. I wonder why this person is not at the center of the storm. Does anyone know who was ultimately responsible for approving the post? 2. What’s the matter with letting healthcare companies promote their prescription assistance programs and philanthropic efforts? Personally, I’d like to hear more about them. What’s funny is that Turner’s group does not serve health insurance companies. Another group, one that serves all kinds of insurance companies, serves that part of the industry. This blog was intended for pharmaceutical advertising readers.3. Raph Levien [Cornelius: he is refering to the comment that Raph has left on my post], I hear you’re pretty lacking in the professionalism department. I heard you crossed a number of lines within Google by slandering this girl in a public forum. Ever heard of “Do no evil”? Hypocrisy at its best. I hope Google is slapping your hand pretty hard because it sounds like you really beat up this girl. The difference is: she endured slander due to an assignment from her team, approved by senior people and you just jumped on her without knowing the whole story. Shame on you. Get with the program: you work for an advertising platform company. Your free healthcare and free lunch come from advertising revenue. Wake up and smell the words “public company.” Google isn’t a start-up anymore.
I don’t work for Google, but if I did and had seen the things you were writing, I would have started asking for *your* resignation. Poor form, man. Poor form.