LFN "Trading Online" event

Fashionista loves any event which enables her to combine her love of fashion with her love of wine and so tottered all the way to Kentish Town on Thursday evening to attend the London Fashion Network event "Trading Online: Getting Noticed" at the Prince of Wales pub.

The panel of industry experts included Stephen Pratley (Shine Marketing), Richard Thorpe (Screen Pages Ltd), Joel Vertes (Olswang) and Barnaby Brown (motelrocks.com) who discussed a number of ways of optimising a website so that you attract traffic to your website and keep people coming back for more. The added bonus was that the event was chaired by Leon Bailey-Green - Fashionista loves his blog!

Some of the more interesting points which came out of the discussion were:

1. The landscape of "paid search" results has changed dramatically since the Google AdWords policy change. It is now possible to buy a 3rd party's trade mark as a keyword, so that when someone types that mark into a Google search engine, your website appears as a sponsored link.


2. Questions were raised as to whether this was "legal". Clearly, it is allowed under the Google AdWords policy, but the question of whether it is a trade mark infringement is currently awaiting determination by the European Court of Justice. There are a number of pending references to the ECJ on this very topic so we will have to wait to see what they conclude.


3. The importance of protecting your brand from the outset was emphasised and a good tip was make sure that your brand name wasn't overly descriptive as this makes it harder to protect - the best brand names in terms of being able to protect them are those that are arbitrary and have little to do with the actual product. Registering the trade marks is crucial as well as buying the key domain names in the .uk and .com space.


4. Recovering domain names which infringe on your trade mark is not as difficult as you might think and there are various ways of doing this - depending on the rights that you have and what the domain name is being used for.

Fashionista picked up some useful information and met some fabulous people - roll on the next event!