In our series on Brand Protection & Social Media” blog posts we highlight how brand protection adds an important dimension to social media strategy and showcases best practices. In our last post we started at the beginning: establishing your brand in social media channels with brand protection in mind.
We all know that social media provides a wonderful opportunity to listen to your audience and the global conversation about your brand. It’s important to know that brandjackers are listening too and may be participating in that conversation by impersonating your brand.
We’re not talking about well-intentioned fans who wish to show their love for a brand. The risk lies with scammers who seek to take advantage of your brand and the goodwill associated with it for their own ends.
The key is to prevent those with ill intent from fooling customers into thinking they’re engaging with your brand. Actively watch for signs that impersonators are tampering with your brand and trying to lead consumers astray.
Signs Your Brand Has Been Hijacked in Social Media:
1) Someone is using your brand as their registered username such as with a maliciously-intended spoof account.
2) Your trademarks and copyrighted content are used liberally including within the name or description of pages blogs etc.
3) The look and feel is difficult to distinguish from your legitimate social media presence.
Monitoring for these instances of brand infringement should be an integral part of your brand protection strategy in social media. The viral nature of these channels can cause misinformation to spread quickly to your consumers and hurt your brand’s reputation. By actively monitoring for impersonators counterfeiters pirates or others with detrimental intent you can stop them before they cause harm.
In our next blog post we’ll discuss a crucial aspect of social media and brand protection strategy: how to take action against brandjackers.”