Has Someone Taken Your Brand Name on Twitter?
As a frequent Twitter user, I am delighted at the idea of Big Brand Names having a Twitter presence. A marketer’s dream, I am very brand-loyal to certain things like soda (Coke, never Pepsi), peanut butter (Jif), store brands (Whole Foods Market & Archer Farms for Target grocery products), coffee (Starbucks), computers (Apple), workout clothes (Nike, Adidas), my favorite store (Anthropologie)… and the list could go on and on.
The reality of Twitter at this present time is that large corporations are tentative. Let’s do a quick check of my favorite brands listed above:
- http://twitter.com/Coke (or CocaCola; Coca-Cola – doesn’t appear to be the company)
- http://twitter.com/Jif (doesn’t appear to be the company)
- http://twitter.com/wholefoods (IS the company and is active, but they need to also register “@WholeFoodsMarket)
- http://twitter.com/target (doesn’t appear to be the company)
- http://twitter.com/archerfarms (account doesn’t exist)
- http://twitter.com/apple (doesn’t appear to be the company)
- http://twitter.com/macintosh (a person has taken it; person also has @mac)
- http://twitter.com/nike (doesn’t appear to be the company)
- http://twitter.com/adidas (doesn’t appear to be the company)
- http://twitter.com/anthropologie (doesn’t appear to be the company)
Out of all these products I purchase or stores I love to visit, only TWO, Whole Foods Market & Starbucks, have even made the effort to register accounts, put their product branding up, and interact with the millions of registered Twitter users that may find them there. (Those two brands are active on Twitter.)
So, what should Coke, Jif, Target, Apple, Nike, Adidas & Anthropologie do, now that their brand names have been registered by people that (it doesn’t appear) are associated with the company? These few examples are lucky – most of the accounts above have little activity. But yesterday an online company named Kirtsy was not so lucky.
Kirtsy, for those unfamiliar, is a great site geared toward women that, in their words “is just like that friend who always finds the best stuff. Only better.” Their Twitter site has 360+ followers and provides site updates, conference information and various nuggets the owner wants to impart.
A brand hijacker has set up KirtsyNews, and has amassed a large following of over 3800 people, and until yesterday I don’t think anyone on Twitter knew this was not an account registered by the Kirtsy company. The reason why is that most of the links go to the Kirtsy site, and they have stolen images of the logo to use, plus the profile link points to the Kirtsy site. Kirtsy has been aware of the issue & raised the flag to Twitter support, I have been told by someone involved with the company. What raised the flag for the rest of us, was the sending of a completely inappropriate pornographic tweet, and now Kirtsy has to scramble harder to get them shut down.
I asked Brett Trout, Iowa patent attorney and author of Cyber Law: A Legal Arsenal for Online Business, if he knew what recourse a corporation has when someone assumes their brand name on a social site like Twitter, and he was kind enough to put together an article with some very good advice on this topic. Please do go and read Social Media Accountjacking so you don’t find yourself in a similar situation.
As a brand manager of sorts for many clients and employers, the idea of someone registering my brand name or holding it hostage is very troubling to me. It is so troubling, in fact, I am planning to write Twitterface terms of service that prevent someone from taking other people’s brands here, something that may take a bit of finesse, but I feel passionately enough about it to try to stop it here.
I am not sure of all the action Kirtsy has taken, but this is what I would consider doing now:
- Post a complaint at Twitter’s getsatisfaction.com support site and ask other users who care about my brand to chime in on the complaint so our voices will be heard & the complaint will be public.
- Follow every single one of the 3800+ followers that KirtsyNews has amassed, and send one message to each of them stating “KirtsyNews” is a fake account, and if they’d like to follow the REAL Kirtsy, to please do so.
- Send word to KirtsyNews via Twitter (if that is the only way they can reach them) that says they have X amount of days to close or turn over the account, before legal action is taken.
And then I would follow Brett Trout’s advice and get legal counsel and a letter of action prepared and find out how I could turn this into a PR opportunity in my favor.
Bottom line: Twitter’s growth is off the charts. Secure your brand names now!!
The company is fairly closed in terms of data, but growth is off the charts and companies should not only be aware of the site, they should lock up their accounts there, or take back brand names that have already been taken. Here’s one reason why. I’ll post more about specific steps a company can take to secure their brand on Twitter, even if they’re not ready to interact yet in that space.
6 Responses to “Has Someone Taken Your Brand Name on Twitter?”
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TESTIMONIALS
What do you do when your “Brand” has more characters than Twitter allows????
My company is Parisian’s Pure Indulgence. I registered PPureIndulgence. It’s all that would fit.
Kelli, that’s a great point. I had not really thought of url limits for the Twitterface product, but need to ask my partner Adil about this. Twitterface is a “page” and not an account name, so that even if your Twitter account name is @PPureIndulgence (which you sort of want, because you only have 140 characters & don’t want tons of them used by your name), we could give you a Twitterface page that is the entire name (for branding purposes.) Thanks for bringing this up!
Regarding the actual Twitter name you chose, you did a pretty good job with shortening it. I don’t know if you have registered your actual name (Kelli Parisian) with Twitter, but I would, and point people over to this account that you use. You can see how I have done that here: http://twitter.com/kristicolvin. That way you might not lose people who may have been hunting for your company name and all they remembered is the “Parisian”.
A tweeter just posted about another issue: what happens when you have been working to secure your Username as an individual across social media and you are contacted by a company that they want “their” username and you should turn it over.
When I go to Twitter and YouTube and so on, I look for the name that I’ve created to start building my online presence. I don’t look to see if it’s trademarked. I look to see if it’s available and if it is, I register in that name.
So, if I decided several years ago that I wanted to be known online as ReigningCat, I started registering. I have been way ahead of the game and am now registered everywhere as ReigningCat. Now, I’m contacted by the business Reigning Cat that I should give up my Twitter Username because they have a right to it because it is their business name.
Or, I have registered everywhere as ATivol, my real first initial and last name. Suddenly, Ativol, Inc. wants my Username. Does the business get it because they are big and have deeper pockets or do I get to keep it because I’m a person, it is my identity, I have created my personal online brand using it, I was paying attention and saw the future and acted accordingly?
Obviously, there are many people trying to squat for profit. They make it harder for the individual who is just following the advice of Internet and Web 2 gurus that everyone should establish his/her personal identity online. Add into this argument, the ongoing discussion among the Twitterati: Is Twitter a community or is it just another place to market your product? If Twitter is about the community, then shouldn’t the individual get first dibs on an established Username and the company have to figure out a work-around?
Thanks for a great article and you have made excellent, thought-provoking points. Well done!
Excellent use cases to think about AJ! While a lot of what I have seen is the taking of names for “illegitimate” use (for example, we witnessed another one last night… Nick Longo had an imitator create an entire copycat account using his full name “Nicholas Longo” and we bitched and kvetched on Twitter and at Get Satisfaction until it was shut down) you bring up solid, legitimate cases.
If it were me making the judgement call, in the case of ReigningCat, I would say you got there first, and the company would have to create a new account name and drive traffic to it. In the second case, your name and initial might not have as much weight as someone who has trademarked and registered that company name, and I don’t mean – you are invalid – but you could use AJ or your firstname/lastname or a number of combinations to set yourself up online, whereas they only have the one name, and most likely, if they are a national or global brand, a lot of disappointed followers are going to hit your account thinking they have found the brand they seek. Just to avoid issue (if it were me) I would hand over that account and set up as something else, or knowing that in advance, not choose that name. That’s not to say it’s what everyone would do, but in the interest of fairness/serving needs, that would be my recommendation to both person and company.
Great stuff to consider – thanks for adding these examples for us all!!
It sounds like Twitter will be implementing a new system for deleting inactive accounts — freeing the name up for someone else to register. I’m sure complaining as this post describes could help speed up this process.
I wrote a tool to let you know when the name you want is finally available to register: http://www.tweettaker.com/
I have a similar problem, my desired account name is taken but I’m not a famous brand and it’s not THAT important for me to get this name on Twitter. But since the twitter name is someone who just tried twitter last year and doesn’t do anything with it anymore I started to search for what I could do about it.
So I’d like to say this is an interesting article! Also I want to leave a tip on this topic. It’s a website that checks your name on a lot of internet based services: http://www.usernamecheck.com/