Simon Whitehouse, senior director, EMEA sales at MarkMonitor, shares his top tips to ensure your brand is protected on social media
Social media is providing many organisations with increased opportunities to engage with audiences, keep abreast of emerging trends, conduct real-time market research and identify and address changing customer needs. As a result, companies are dedicating more budget to online marketing endeavours and developing concrete social media strategies to support them.
This is especially evident in research conducted by analyst organisation Gartner, which found that digital marketing spend will increase by 10 per cent in 2014. However, alongside this increase in budget and use of digital marketing methods, including the use of social media, there are potential pitfalls. Often organisations overlook the need to monitor for brand protection-related issues, including brand impersonation, account spoofing, and counterfeit goods in the social media sphere. This view is reinforced by research carried out by Grant Thornton, which indicates that 59 per cent of companies do not perform a risk assessment when it comes to social.
One of the main dangers of social media from a business perspective, is that it’s often presented as showing customers an organisation’s human side. As a result, many customers may take brands’ social media accounts at face value, regardless of their legitimacy. With social media and digital marketing forming such an important part of an organisation’s brand building strategy, it is therefore crucial that any risks are identified and assessed. This will assist the company in avoiding damaging hard-earned customer and brand trust, and the ability to engage with customers one-on-one.
How is your brand at risk?
Your brand is vulnerable to impersonation; imitators can misappropriate items such as copyrighted images, photos or trademarked brand names or slogans and use them to communicate with your customers or potential customers to further their own aims. Whether those aims are financial or merely malicious, the result is damaging to your brand in terms of credibility and customer trust.
When scammers and impersonators are motivated by financial gain, they can use social media to mislead customers through fraud or counterfeiting. This can be accomplished by setting up fake pages or profiles with the unauthorised use of copyrighted materials and/or trademarks in order to appear legitimate.
The next step is then developing ways in which to combat instances of brand misuse or misappropriation. There are a number of best practice approaches that can be incorporated into your strategy to help preserve customer trust and the health of your brand:
Make it official
Regardless of your social media presence – a blog, microblog, social network account – make sure that you have taken the appropriate steps to make it official. Proactively register your brands as usernames across leading and new social media sites.
Certain social media sites have a – process whereby you can prove your legitimacy, offering verified labels for accounts. For those sites that do not offer this option, make sure your company’s official website includes icons, information and links that lead to your social media presence.
In addition, while your company may already have registered and/or recovered all of your brand’s vanity URLs, you should also pay attention to emerging, special interest or lesser-known social media sites. With the growth of social media and new sites being established all the time, this should form a ongoing part of your strategy.
Monitor, monitor, monitor
In the social sphere it is relatively easy for scammers to impersonate a brand. As a result, one of the most important aspects of any strategy is to prevent this misuse and stop scammers from fooling your customers and engaging with them. Consistent monitoring for impersonation and the misuse of brands and trademarks is the cornerstone of this approach. There are tools available in the market that can assist in automatically searching social media for unauthorised use of your brands and trademarks.
Take action
Monitoring for misuse and abuse forms only one aspect of your strategy. Once any scammers, impersonators or counterfeiters have been identified, you need to take appropriate action. This can vary, depending on the circumstances, and can include a number of approaches. Your organisation can contact the scammer or impersonator directly to understand their motives and explain how this activity is in violation of your brand guidelines. Or you may need to catalogue the activity and report the impersonator or scammer to the relevant social media site so that it can enforce its terms of service.
Social media as a marketing tool presents organisations with both opportunities and risks. In addition to affecting the credibility of your brand and customer trust, impersonators, scammers and counterfeiters will ultimately have an impact on your bottom line. Therefore, in order to ensure your brand is able to enjoy the benefits of the far-reaching, transparent and viral nature of social media and negate the potential risks posed by scammers, fraudsters and counterfeiters, incorporating brand protection into your social media strategy is key.
