Brands On Twitter #omghelp

Posted by Abe Sauer on November 11, 2009 05:05 PM

brands on twitter What a difference a decade makes. Just ten years ago, brands were given huge headaches by cyber-squatters: users who had beat them to registering their brand-name Internet URLs and were misrepresenting the brand.

No such problems today. Now, brands are given huge headaches by cyber-squatters, users who had beat them to registering their brand-name Twitter accounts and are misrepresenting the brand.

Ad Age fires up what seems to be a time machine and reports that Burger King, Bank of America, Volkswagen, Macy's, Mastercard, and Wal-Mart are just some of the brands that do not own or control their respective Twitter handles. The list includes Walt Disney (DISNEY!)

What's a brand to do? Hyundai, not in control of the @Hyundai handle, tweets from @HyundaiNews. (Just as we use @brandchannelhub.) And while that may be an acceptable temporary fix, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the dangers of a brand not controlling communications that seem to represent it.

Twitter does respond to brands attempting to wrest back control of their Twitter handles, but it can take a while. In Home Depot's case a full year. A year, by the way, is, like, eternity plus a month in Twitter time.

But there is a lesson here. Any brand, especially a large multinational one, should make it the job of its chief information officer or whoever is charged with technology and/or communications to be on top of whatever new technology is rolling out, be it Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo or "the next Twitter" Foursquare, and jump on it immediately. Even if it ends up being Friendster, it's better to be safe than #sorry.

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Josh Bourne says:

Cybersquatting is actually the act of registering domain names, especially those identical or confusingly similar to existing trademarks, with the intention of reselling them at an inflated price or otherwise profiting from them in bad faith. When a third party registers a brand’s handle on Twitter and uses the handle to misrepresent the brand, this is a form of usersquatting.

It’s not true that there are “no such problems [of cybersquatting] today”—cybersquatting is still rampant, forcing brands to monitor and defend their brand in the domain name space. It’s just that in addition to cybersquatting, the problem of brand infringement has extended outside of the domain name space to include usersquatting. What’s interesting is that usersquatters are picking up the same monetization model that cybersquatters used a decade ago.

Cybersquatters used to register an infringing domain name with the hope of selling it to the brand for a hefty sum; nowadays, domain name cybersquatting grows unchecked largely because of the ability of the fraudster to monetize the clicks from the traffic going to the site. There currently is no real way to monetize the traffic going to usernames and handles, so we are seeing usersquatters picking up the same techniques that cybersquatters used 10 years ago—they’re registering handles and usernames of brands with the hopes of selling them to the brand.

Brands need to develop a strategy to proactively claim their handles and usernames and recover those that have already been registered by third parties using an approach that is vigilant, yet scalable. While the chief information officer may be the right point person for this strategy development and implementation, oftentimes it's the CTO's or General Counsel's area of responsibility to deal with these matters (depending on how the company has allocated management of their digital brands).

November 12, 2009 10:49 AM #

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