Coping with Corporate Brandjacking on Twitter
You will be hearing more and more about brandjacking, the practice of an individual taking a corporate brand name for themselves because they see it’s available, and using it in varying degrees of appropriateness or just holding it hostage with no activity. What do you do when this happens?
Here are a few options:
1. GET TWITTER TO SHUT DOWN THE BAD GUYS, PRONTO
If there is inappropriate activity being conducted using your brand name, you must stop it immediately by any means necessary. Yesterday morning things came to a head with the KirtsyNews situation I recently wrote about. I noticed that there were even more followers on the account, and the pornographic tweets were increasing. I am not involved with Kirtsy in any way, but I became outraged because KirtsyNews was still allowed to have this account on Twitter. People from Kirtsy have told me they tried to get it shut down but nothing had happened yet. In the meantime, the Kirtsy brand was taking a hit everytime a porn tweet went out to the 4,000+ followers of the KirtsyNews account.
I submitted a help ticket at Twitter’s Get Satisfaction support site, and you can see the progress and process of getting KirtsyNews shut down here. The bottom line is, within a couple of hours of submitting the help ticket, the KirtsyNews account was suspended and we will hear from them no more. So this is one way to address issues of brand hijacking on Twitter. It should be noted that although I don’t know all the details, apparently Kirtsy had this issue before, and had to battle an imposter to get their current Kirtsy account. If you don’t already, you should follow them – they’re good people & have interesting things going on for women, especially, at kirtsy.com.
2. RECLAIM ACCOUNTS WITH YOUR BRAND NAME
My friends at Microblink have published a detailed article on getting your brand name released to you and away from an imposter or person, so I am going to ask that you go and read “How to Reclaim Registered or Inactive Twitter Accounts” for that information.
It’s important to understand the difference between an imposter and simply a person who has decided they like your brand name as a “handle”. An imposter sets themselves up so that people will believe they are dealing with your brand. This is what KirtsyNews did, though I don’t think they intended to send pornographic tweets out (that was a recent issue brought on by people behaving badly at the Kirtsy site.) The bio/avatar/company link, etc. all went to the Kirtsy site, so that is clearly an imposter (whether or not harm was intended.)
A “fan” will sometimes take your brand name out of enthusiasm, to form a community. If that is the case you have to weigh whether or not they should be shut down, or dealt with so that the intention is clear. A fan may also have complaints or deal with others who do, so the account name and information has to make it clear that they do not represent your company or brand. With fans, so that you don’t alienate them, I would recommend dealing with them directly and getting them to adjust wording or account names so that everything is represented properly.
And then there are the account hostage situations. Some of these are obvious – they want to sell you your account and Twitter will yank it immediately, from what I understand. Some of these make no sense – someone takes your brand name and just sits there, doing nothing with it. You can usually get these back, just follow the steps Microblink laid out.
3. PROTECT YOUR INTELLECTUAL BRAND PROPERTY – EVEN THE AD CAMPAIGNS
The world is filled with brainiacs that like to get attention. Recently several blog articles went up talking about Burger King sending a Cease & Desist notice via Twitter to someone who had registered the WhopperVirgins account. Microblink has an excellent, detailed article about the whole saga. I personally had been questioning TheBKLounge account, and wrote them on Twitter asking if they were the official account several days ago, but got no response. Their tweets, if studied, do not sound like something corporate marketing or public relations would do… they are far too casual and not focused on the promotion of Burger King.
So… from a brand management standpoint, and to pick on poor Burger King a moment more (just as a corporate example), where do they stand on Twitter? Here’s a breakdown of Burger King brand taxonomy in account names as of the end of 2008.
Held Hostage? (Perhaps)
http://twitter.com/burgerking
http://twitter.com/whopper
Active Accounts/ Semi-Imposters
http://twitter.com/thebKlounge (semi-representative of company)
http://twitter.com/whoppervirgins (mystery individual who took latest ad campaign name)
Not Registered (If I were Burger King, I would register these today!)
http://twitter.com/flamebroiled (product differentiator)
http://twitter.com/haveityourway (Burger King’s tagline)
http://twitter.com/croissanwich (Unique breakfast item)
http://twitter.com/whopperfreakout (previous ad campaign)
Legitimate
http://twitter.com/bk (Used by real person with these initials BUT this is a key Burger King domain name, so a brand loss on Twitter)
The obvious question to me, is why on earth is Burger King choosing to ignore Twitter instead of taking advantage of FREE promotion and interacting with customers? In the last 24 hours, Twitter search reveals 14 pages worth of search results from people who have mentioned the words “Burger King” – this isn’t just today, this is every day, every week, every month, every year.
What are major brands waiting for? Twitter is not a fad, it’s growing, and brands/companies have a presence there whether you are designing it deliberately or not. If you are a company of any size, with product or service to sell or cause to promote, please think about this and then go and register at Twitter or ask me for help if you have concerns or are hesitant.
3 Responses to “Coping with Corporate Brandjacking on Twitter”
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TESTIMONIALS
Kristi,
Thanks for linking us up in your article. It feels great to be a useful resource for others.
I couldn’t agree with you more that companies need to take a look at Twitter and AT LEAST just get out there to protect their existing brands. Referring to the post I wrote on Microblink a few weeks ago, businesses need to register these accounts, whether they dive in right away or take some time to figure it all out.
In my opinion, even though Twitter’s user numbers aren’t as high as other places, the people that are using it are influencers with wide networks. And because this is all taking place on the web, the ability for these users to make an online impact on a brand and/or company is huge.
Hopefully with continued great posts like this and the help of others in the space, we can bring more brands into the folds of Twitter and help them navigate the waters effectively.
Smart post. In the end it is up to the social media platform to enforce trademark abuse. One other controversial forward slash debate is: Who should be given the right to certain generic terms that are registered on a social media platform? I know from experience that at any moment if the social media platform decides that they want to re-claim a forwardslash name, they’ll do it. When MySpace.com first started I used myspace.com/tickets as my myspace page (for over a year and half) to promote local music shows. Without one single word of warning, MySpace took over that space without ever contacting me or even sending a notice that they were going to do what they did. Pretty crazy in my opinion, I tried contacting them and never received a response. This is the day that I lost faith in other peoples platforms. This is the danger of generating content on a platform that really is not yours to manage or control.
In the domain world one would refer to WIPO (The World Intellectual Property Organization) when there is a trademark dispute over a domain name. There is also a legal measure one can take that is recognized by ICANN, which works by filing a UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) It’s typically a $1500 process where a panel of arbitrators listen to a claim and review the facts a come to a decision. Majority rules. Usually 2 votes out of 3.
Here’s a link to learn more: http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/udrp.htm
Mike, you know I’m with you 100% on brands registering their names NOW, whether they want to deal with the social platform or not. Why leave them open and unprotected? You and I talk about this a lot with each other, but we have to find a way to get the message in the hands of brand managers for these large corporations (and some of them think this is a non-issue, teeny-bopper fad they need not concern themselves with.)
Jamie, that is really unfortunate about your MySpace situation, because the word “tickets” is so generic as to not be trademarked, right??? Great points about the lack of control you essentially have on these sites – I really appreciate you chiming in here with this food for thought. I have to determine the Twitterface guidelines for brand names, etc. and will keep your story in mind because I don’t think what happened in your case is right.
Someone else made a comment, that is so antagonistic I am not going to approve it (littered with curse words and flaming me for writing this) but they made a point. To “Whopper”: if that is your nickname, and you got there first, and you are using the account in a way that has nothing to do with a company brand, then I don’t necessarily think a platform like Twitter should yank that from you. (I don’t know Twitter’s policy on this.) HOWEVER, if your nickname happens to be someone’s actual registered trademark, then you might expect, and it might be fair of them to try to obtain that account name. People search for the brands they are familiar with online – if you got there first, that might be bad for them, but if they have legal right to it, you just might have to release it to them, even if it was your nickname since birth. I don’t really know the law on that. It’s too bad you didn’t want to have a respectful conversation about it instead of lambasting me for this post, because the scenario does present a lot of issues to discuss and it’s a great point to raise.