In our last posting, we talked about how we’ve made ourselves our own best case study by putting our own brand on the line to illustrate how we can help you protect yours.

As we discussed last time, there are unscrupulous individuals and groups who are hijacking brands for both sport and profit.  In our case, a hijacker registered and began impersonating the Buzzphoria brand on Twitter.

The first step in defending your company and brand when a hijacker hits it to verse yourself on your rights within terms of service for the social media platform or site in which your brand has been compromised.

Below is a screen shot from Twitter’s Terms of Service:

Twitter Terms of Service

Notice that the Terms of Service clearly state that:

1. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.
2. You may not use the Twitter.com service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. International users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.
3. You must not, in the use of Twitter, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright laws).

Twitter General Conditions - Terms of Service

Please note the following:

1. We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Use.
2. We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.

Below, we’ve share the final section of Twitter’s Terms of Service - Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours):

Twitter Terms of Service - Copyright

Please note the following:

Twitter undertakes to obey all relevant copyright laws. We will review all claims of copyright infringement received and remove content deemed to have been posted or distributed in violation of any such laws. To make a claim, please provide us with the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or the person authorized to act on its behalf;
2. A description of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed;
3. A description of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to permit Twitter to locate the material;
4. Your contact information, including your address, telephone number, and email;
5. A statement by you that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

At the beginning of the .com boom, it was squatters grabbing brand names they felt were valuable and holding them for ransom to corporations.  In the past weeks and months, it was employees at a Dominoes who disparaged the brand by posting YouTube videos, causing the company to go into crisis communications mode.  It hasn’t just happened to Dominos:  with the rise of user generated content, comes the crush of corporations being impersonated and spoofed across user-generated mediums, creating more publicity nightmares, crisis communications situations and expensive legal battles.

Equally as deadly and dangerous to brands, are imposters who grab brand names within popular social media platforms such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, to name a few…

Thus, the Buzzphoria case study continues… We too were a victim of brand high-jacking and the retrieval process to gain our brand back.

Within Scott Allen’s original blog post about Buzzphoria, he essentially posed a call to action for someone to high-jack the Buzzphoria name and identity within multiple social media sites.  Someone took him up on it and immediately grabbed the Twitter identity @buzzphoria.  The individual(s) then took elements of artwork from the Buzzphoria website and set up a branded page, representing themselves as our brand.  From our tracking, we witnessed the individual(s) populating the page with tweets representing themselves as us, sent to the followers the culprit(s) had begun amassing.

When we spoke to Scott Allen, he told us that the culprit(s) had reached out to him and had let him know that they would give us our brand back…if we asked.

Unfortunately, most corporations don’t see that level of generosity and kindness (I’m being facetious here…).  No…brand high-jackers do not usually reach out to a blogger or journalist to say - “hey, if you do talk to that company let them know I’d be happy to hand them back their brand…”

So, what’s the journey for a corporation or brand to retrieve its identity?  (without an expensive and protracted legal battle?)

Our next few posts will show you step by step how we were able to retrieve our identity from Twitter.

In our last post we talked about Buzzphoria being our own best case study. Our example was blogger journalism and some of the comments received helped to also illustrate other elements of our case study such as freedom of speech and brand hijacking.

As part of our case study we decided to illustrate the mistakes companies often make in thinking they absolutely have to have a blog…

Perhaps that’s why there are estimates that there will be 110 billion blogs by 2010.

See, so often companies feel compelled that they have to have a blog just because they have to have a blog.

They never ask themselves the critical questions:

- why they have to have it,
- how are they going to maintain it,
- what do they want it to achieve - what’s the blog’s purpose,
- how are they going to build a following for it,
- what voice do they want to set with it,
- what do they want to say,
- more importantly, do they have something to say?

Instead many companies rush to set up their blogs. They post a couple times, get side-tracked by other projects, lose interest and ultimately abandon the blog.

They enter into the blogging endeavor like Kevin Costner clones in Field of Dreams thinking all they have to do is say, “Hello World”

And they wait, and they wait and they wait…a long time. Like a tree falling in a forest, did anyone hear it fall?

Waiting…Waiting…For that one person to say hello back.

For most no one ever says hello back.

In our case we waited patiently for 5 months from the time we posted that blog page for the first hello.

In our case it came through five months later through a tweet by Jim “Genuine” Turner who was first to note that we had left the original Word Press message “Hello World” sitting out there.

This led to Mr. Allen. That led to tweets and blog re-postings and link backs chastising us for what these folks perceived to be our foolishness, a novice error.

Thank you gentlemen for proving another of our points to our clients:
You don’t need a blog just for the sake of having a blog. Only do it if there’s a reason why anyone would care…

And then maybe, if they’ve developed the right strategy, done the proper planning and knew what their end game was the pollination effect will begin to take hold. 

In our last post, we talked about having the end game in mind when you enter your brand or company into the social media stratosphere.

We figured the best way to illustrate what brands and corporations often do wrong (without pointing fingers at brands and corporations that are doing it wrong) was to create a case study and example.

Congrats to journalist, blogger and social media guru Scott “Social Media” Allen for revealing typical bungles brands make and special thanks for also illustrating our point about the dangers many companies don’t realize when they embark on the social media journey. Naive mistakes, they make, but that’s what happens to the naive.

Numerous studies estimate by 2010 there will be over 1 billion blogs worldwide. 

According to Reuters, many people see blogs as alternatives to the mainstream media. Reuters goes on the say that many bloggers do so as a hobby rather than as a vocation, with 77 percent of them saying they post to express themselves creatively rather than to get noticed or paid.

Reuters pointed out these specifics:

37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topic, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.

About 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism.

 Just over a third of bloggers said they engage often in journalistic activities such as verifying facts and linking to source material.

 More than 40 percent of bloggers said they never quote sources or other media directly.

11 percent said they post corrections.

61 percent said they rarely or never get permission to use copyrighted material.

55 percent of bloggers write under a pseudonym.

Nearly 90 percent invite comments from other readers. 

Four out of five blogs use text, while 72 percent display photos and audio links play on 30 percent of blogs. 

82 percent of bloggers think they will still be blogging in a year. 3 percent say they have quit. 

We especially appreciate Scott Allen’s help in communicating an important message to our clients by  dissecting many  of the things we intentionally did wrong or left incomplete. (See his blog posting published March 27 @ http://scottsocialmediaallen.com/index.php/buzzphoria-social-media-reality-check/)

But Mr. Allen never called the subject of his critical story prior to publishing it.

Had Mr. Allen — who admits in his post about Buzzphoria that he had contact information (it is after all posted on our website), contacted us he would have learned the end game strategy around our public launch.

In fact, we reached out to Mr. Allen via email through his blog and received a response in less than 24 hours.

The good news is that Scott Allen is an exception to the complete point we were looking to illustrate.

After our reaching out to him and letting him in on our end game, he’s turned out to be an amazing good sport.

Mr. Allen makes the #1 point we needed our clients to realize:  many bloggers feel no responsibility to contact the subject of a critical story . . . at all!

Thank you Mr. Allen. You helped us achieve our end game…generating social publicity for us and reinforcing the many points we evangelize to our clients about the dangers of lack of proper planning and the potential irresponsibility of bloggers and journalists who do not properly fact check.  This is EXACTLY why our clients hire us and why we generate such great results for them.

Watch for posts over the coming days and weeks as we reveal more of our end game…