Brand Hijacking – Does it Matter?
By Jim Symcox on Jan 3, 2009 in blog strategy, Branding, business strategy, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Ogilvy On Advertising, Twitter, Twitter Tools
Armando Alves show an example of brand hijacking by Twitter users. The users were fans of the AMC Series “Mad Men” about advertising agencies in the 1960′s. They set-up the character names on Twitter and simply extended by Twittering as though they were the cast.
And of course I just had to follow the David Ogilvy character!
There have been other cases of brand hijacking, fans writing further stories about Star Wars for example. And the Internet has made it easy to share your own stories based around other famous characters.
However, as I’ve said before the brand becomes what your fans/users/customers/clients want it to be. So you need to think long and hard before coming down on anyone who does "hijack" your brand. Because they may enhance it for you and even take it in new directions you weren’t even aware of.
And of course brand hijacking does matter, so it’s important that you keep abreast of new ways of working that could affect your business.
Currently it’s social media and Twitter. So if you’re in Film, TV or you’re writing books you need to reserve your names in Twitter before someone else uses them.
Registering Your Twitter Name
And you need to do it quick because people are registering a lot of different names, I suspect in the hope that they become valuable in the same way domain names have!
Names like Winston Churchill, Leonardo Da Vinci, Washington, Manchester even a Motorway (the M62) and try registering CarInsurance – yes, they’re all gone already.
There appear to be no country names available…
So whether Social media is here to stay or vanishes forever in a year’s time it’s important that you put a little effort into registering the names you want on Twitter (and on the other social media sites too).
Get my Free Guide to Setting up and using Twitter in business (before I revise it and start selling it!)
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