Online Brand Image: Align 'O' Malign

Sun Jul 19 11:33:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

Internet is not the basic element for humans to survive but a basic service for humanity to thrive. Internet has far overgrown even to the fancy of its inventors. This growth has turned into a mass opportunity for newer and older brands but there is a cost associated with it. This cost has to be paid by means of protecting the online image, name, fame and reputation of your brand. This binary platform called Internet is a border less flat market with no uniform rules and regulations. Counterfeits, hoarders, opportunists, copycats and the more respectable ones known as competitors are all there. This latest blog of mine is an analysis about the major hurdles en route to your online brand image protection from those who do not play the fair game.

Most important identity  on World Wide Web is domain name. This is where everything which is anything, begins.

Domain Distortion:

Selling or maintaining your brand on Internet very different from 20 second television commercial or newspaper advert. Your brand is not only recognized by your domain and visa versa, But also with the medium, which a user takes to find you on Internet. It could be an online advertisement, search engine, referrals or direct hit. Your domain and its distortion can lead to bad name about your brand image and hence equity.

Domains (specially ".com") are sold to anyone who wants to buy it. That helps hoarders to pile up their collection of domains and jack up the prices. Smarter word for this hording is Domain reselling. This activity causes grave risk to your brand image in many ways:

Cybersquatting: The cyber squatter offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price. **

Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, is a form of Cybersquatting which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. Lets say I book a domain name with Google with a single "O". Many Google visitors will do this mistake and land up on this domain and can play in hands of website administrator, without even knowing where they are. Should a user accidentally enter an incorrect website address, they may be led to an alternative website owned by a Cybersquatter.

Yet another approach is "name jacking" which is accomplished by purchasing an individual's name as a second-level domain name. Setting up a website allows the purchaser to capitalize on any searches done for that name. How about getting MahatmaGandhi1.com? Then using or abusing this gifted name. A growing trend is the increasingly common use of "derogatory registration". I want to defame the name of some organization and all I got to do is, start writing bad about them by using a domain name Crap%company%.com or %company%Sucks.com.

So keep your eyes open or hire some professional ones to protect your brand image, as a frustrated competitor or customer can be eating into your name. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) polices are only going to help you if you know who is doing the damage.

Twitter/ Social Networking: The New Marketplaces

Power of microblogging and social-networking sties like Twitter, Facebook can not be ignored and not managing your Brand Image here can only dent your success. Twitter has potential to be the next self-sustaining cyber world or community or cult inside Internet. From abilities of social networking, micro blogging, real time search engine, brand promotion and managing individual identity, this new wave can change the face of Internet.

Using the techniques of Cybersquatting, Typosquatting, name-jacking, derogatory registration as the usernames (rather than domain names) on these social-networking and microblogging sites can harm your brand image. Frustrated ex-employees, spammers, competitors or just greedy individual can hold you for ransom by maligning your name, products and organizations. This is a black market and you cannot close your eyes. Keep your eyes open to this kind of negative promotions else your brand will be a sitting duck. There are many companies on Internet, which provide service for managing your online brand image, so better know about them.

SEO: The Doubtful Character

Questioning SEO! Many guys will be looking out for my neck. But this is true SEO has a darker side also. It stands for Search Engine Optimization and at crust of it SEO is a good thing. It empowers web sites to inform the search engines (like Google etc.) about the important content for indexing. Then people like you and me use search engines for getting these high value results.

Major force behind SEO is a rat race of showing a webpage on top of others in a search engine. Higher the ranking in a search engine, higher web traffic it will generate. Using right kind of keywords many times in content, with right kind of URL/domain name and HTML TAG modifications people can push up their rankings in Search Engines even though they should not be their. Individuals will be amazed to know how sometime search results on their own company name will show up below some secondary candidates.

One can still live with lower rankings but what if with your good name, individuals are attracted to a web page and in a while redirected to something real objectionable. Will you let that happen? No you cannot. Your customers can be lured into providing their personal information or anything illegal can be showed to them. So, how you rank on the search engines also plays a very important part in you online brand image. Either employ fair SEO tactics or report unfair ones to search engines. Professional consultants are there to help you.

Plagiarism:

Heard of copycats! Yes that is what plagiarists do. This is a poisonous cocktail of lifting the work of someone and using it for your self in different language, packaging or process. This can deeply impact your search engine rankings alongside of derecognition. Due to the very nature of the Internet Plagiarism is not only hard to detect but also hard to prove. God forbids if someone translates your work to Urdu language you will never even know that.

This problem of Plagiarism is rampant on Internet and allowed by companies and people up to controlled level. Say if someone wants to refer my work : few paragraphs of my content, it is permitted as long as he/she refers to original source (So that is not Plagiarism). But plagiarists do not care to seek permission while translating or jumbling up the words to make it look different.

Many companies help you deal with Plagiarism on the web and some free/commercial tools available. One of them being CopyScape which I use for myself.

The four major points of Domain distortion, Social Media protection, SEO and Plagiarism are the major points which no brand/individual should ignore for its online image. Recently Big shopping malls in USA have started hiring for the position of Social Networking Manager. Which proves how important it has become to hold your brand high on web 2.0.

Reference:

Wikipedia on Cybersquatting

Courtesy:

Free Stock Photos for websites - FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Posted at 11:33AM Jul 19, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[1]