Ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s expensive. Invest in Online Brand Protection

The internet can be either a boon or boondoggle to companies when it comes to the monitoring of their online brand presence.

For companies that pay little attention to their online storefronts, the rewards are continual brand hijacking, abusive pay-per-click tactics and outright attacks on brands.

MarkMonitor, an enterprise brand protection firm, offers solutions and services to safeguard brands, reputation and revenue from online risks. In their white paper “Online Brand Protection: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Proactive Strategy” MarkMonitor recommends a series of protective measures, including:

• Identifying all domain names in your portfolio
• Manage your portfolio proactively
• Monitor for potential abuse
• Respond to abuse

Great paper–in particular, we recommend you take a look at the section on monitoring for potential abuse. You can do this inside your company, or there are several online services that offer affordable methods to do this for you. No matter how you do it, the key is never-ending vigilance.

Creating an ideal domain portfolio is a good start to establishing and protecting your corporate brands online. However, it is just the beginning. While defensive registrations enable you to own and control the domain names that may be abused by third parties, it is simply impossible for any corporation to register every potentially harmful domain name. Therefore, the next critical step for defending your brands online is to establish a strategic monitoring program that constantly searches the internet for potential abuses, including:

• Cybersquatting
• Domain kiting/tasting
• Trademark infringement
• Traffic diversion schemes
• False associations with unrelated third parties
• Pay-per-click abuse
• Sponsored in abuse
• Logo/image abuse
• Offensive content
• Channel non-compliance with brand guidelines and/or pricing

Many small–and even larger–companies cannot afford to hire a person devoted to these critical tasks. This is what the bad guys count on. Again, a monitoring service is worth the price if it can save you the damage of brand equity loss, not to mention real money gone forever due to internet banditry. (They can also help you identify new customers–but that’s another post).

A comprehensive, proactive social media monitoring and interactive strategy is also a hedge against bad actors, as your customers will be in regular communication with you and often tell you when they spot a spoof site or a shady deal involving your brand.

Brand managers should assess the degree to which website traffic is diverted to sites that abuse its brand and the amount of lost advertising revenue that is diverted to fraudulent pay-per-click sites, You should look at quantitative and qualitative indicators, including:

• Degree of fewer “negative impressions” due to successfully shutting down web site which degrade your brand
• Improvement in website traffic due to successfully shutting down traffic diversion tactics (Cybersquatting, pat-per-click sites, paid search ads)
• Better quality response rate to online advertising due to successfully shutting down fraudulent pay-per-click sites
• Productivity gains and/or hours saved per week in detecting and responding to infringement by leveraging available technologies and solutions

From the public relations perspective, monitoring is critical in protecting your brand’s reputation and credibility. One of the services we provide at AlexanderG Public Relations includes online brand monitoring and image management. This helps us head off potentially bad PR by identifying and addressing problems before they become full-blown crises; it also helps our clients determine where best to apply their messaging and online resources–often increasing market share in the process.

Nasty stuff outlined in this post is happening to oblivious companies everyday. The message is simple: if you don’t know what’s going in your online storefront, it’s the same as someone setting up a fake store just around the corner from yours in real-life –selling low quality goods and ruining your good name.

Ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s expensive.