Brand Abuse - How can you ignore your brand being abused?
Posted by Shanna Gordon on Tue, Feb 02, 2010
If someone was breaking into your house every night while you slept and was taking money from your piggy bank….wouldn’t you try to stop it? So why aren’t large corporations not doing more to stop perpetrators from continuously stealing revenue from their bottom line? Through traffic diversion schemes
selling of counterfeit goods, unauthorized associations, identity theft attacks and defamatory social media discussion, brands are being violated, reputations tarnished and significant revenues lost.
Traffic diversion schemes include domain cyber squatting (i.e.www.fasebook.com), and many various tactics to direct traffic away from your site (sometimes to competitors sites or even pornography).
Why spend thousands or even millions of dollars on a marketing budget just to have the benefits diluted and revenue stolen from you through various traffic diversion schemes. CMO’s need to start paying attention to this and start protecting their brands.
Wouldn’t you also want to know if someone was saying they were a partner of yours? Think it’s not important? Take for example a financial organization down south….we recently found a “hate group” site claiming on their website that they conduct all their banking at this organization. If one influential blogger/tweeter comes across this post, the banks reputation can be tarnished in days or even hours through social media. Which brings me to my next point…
Marketers also need to continuously monitor social media sites for potentially damaging situations. It only takes minutes for once again an influential blogger to say something slanderous, someone to make a negative video or a disgruntled employee to post confidential information and the word spreads like wild fire. Free tools can provide some minimal coverage but the time it takes to weed through the junk is prohibitive. Prioritizing what’s relevant and emotionally charged to mitigate negative impact on your brand is necessary.
I think some of the hesitation in the past for marketing departments not leveraging brand protection services is that they didn’t know what they would do with these “issues” once they were uncovered. They also strongly hesitated getting their legal departments involved in these situations, for obvious reasons (very expensive!)…..so why not just ignore it? That is where cease and desist capabilities can help manage these situations in a very cost effective way and help r
emove the vast majority of the threats uncovered. Not to toot our horn, but BrandProtect’s track record for getting infractions removed via cease and desist methods alone is approximately 70-80%.
So once again, I ask the question…..if someone was breaking into your piggy bank every night, wouldn’t you try to stop it?