Owning Your Brand Online

You spend hours, coming up with your perfect business model. Then you spend weeks, drafting your plan. Then you spend months of sweat equity and labor, poring over every aspect of your dream, making sure you’re represented just the way you’d like.

Then you wake up one morning to find out someone else has come up with a username two letters or one word off of yours, their site incorporates the same colors, and you’re getting calls from your contacts saying, “Whoa! I thought that was you going off on Twitter the other day, but it was really ________(Insert usurped name here). Uh-oh. What’s a sister to do?

First step: When drafting your own brand, do as much research as possible to insure that YOU’RE not being an accidental copycat. After all, if you’re going to all this trouble, you want to be unique, not a watered down version of an established brand.  If your .url or username is close to a competitor, rethink it.

Second step: OK. So you have a brand. Now, lock it down. Get all the URLs that are close to it, and use them to re-direct traffic to your main site. If possible, get as many Twitter names as possible that are close to it, by using a Gmail address formatted like this: (random word).youremailaddress@gmail.com It should work for up to 10 usernames, which should be all you need. After all, you don’t want to be a squatter, just protect your brand. Make sure to tweet from the others every 6 months, or they will be released.

What about all the other social networking sites? Let’s face it, there’s so many we’ll never use them all: BUT, you sure don’t want someone else out there operating with your user name. I’m a big fan of Knowem, which has a free search function across 300 plus sites. For a premium, they’ll secure your usernames for you, and for a higher one, they’ll build out your profiles. The value of that is determined by the individual user, but I would think hard about it.

If your brand is being used for business purposes instead of pure networking, consider copyrighting and trademarking your brand as early in the process as possible. You want to show a timeline that makes it difficult for usurpers to claim they were actually using it for business first. (That’s right- you can be using a word or phrase, but if someone else can show they were using it FOR BUSINESS earlier, you lose. So don’t wait.)

Use whatever means possible to own your category for search. In some cases, this should be incorporated from the getgo. A classic example is Shoemoney. By having a brand name that he invented, he guaranteed search dominance in that category. Is there a unique phrase that you can coin, trademark as early as possible, and just rock in the search traffic? Probably.

If your brand is hijacked, you can attempt to contact the other user,  explain the situation, and hope they’re amenable to modifying their brand: but don’t bank on it. Chances are they’re as committed to theirs as you are to yours, even if they’re much newer to the scene. If you initiate a civil discussion and explain your reasons without casting blame, who knows? Maybe they’ll see your point. But I wouldn’t put all my eggs in that basket.

And, first and foremost, be an active and vocal community member. If people know you, who you are and what you’re about, a usurper won’t gain traction. And if you need to issue a public call to action, it will be heard. It could be the person didn’t realize they were so close to your brand. But once they found out, they should re-position themselves- after all, copycatting doesn’t benefit anyone in the long run.

Have you dealt with this in your business before, and how did it turn out for you? I’d love to hear your experiences.

Lindsay

(AKA RockandRollMama)