ONLINE BRAND PROTECTION - MUST-KNOW TACTICS TO SAFEGUARD YOUR BUSINESS
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Latest Breaking News - Internet - Viewing: Online Brand Protection - Must-know Tactics To Safeguard Your Business Saturday, February 06, 2010 Intellectual property, trademarks and copyrights--if you are in business, you probably know what these are and how important they are. However, an online business has additional factors that must be considered to protect its brand within the Web's wide exposure. What follows is an excerpt from a Brandsplat Video Report in which Brandsplat CCO Enzo F. Cesario interviews Daniel Greenberg, director of domain name management and online brand protection for Lexsynergy. CESARIO: Can you tell us a little bit about brand protection? Can you define it for us? GREENBERG: Brand protection involves various methods that allow a brand owner to prevent third parties from infringing upon their particular mark. So, for instance, it includes buying a trademark, registering a domain name, registering copyrights, patents and designs where applicable. In essence, it prevents third parties from using the particular mark unlawfully. For instance, the word Brandsplat would be a trademark, the domain name is Brandsplat dot com and the layout and content of the site would be copyright. So, all these put together is intellectual property, which amounts to brand protection. CESARIO: So is your domain name an online trademark? Can you expound on that? GREENBERG: Yes, it has become a species of online trademark. For instance, most people do their business online, they shop online, they bank online; and if you don't have control of your brand over the Internet, it will be very difficult for customers to locate you. So, if you had to compare it to the bricks-and-mortar world, it's almost the signage that is outside your business. For instance, in the online world, if you don't control your particular mark or your brand, it's as if your competitor has taken your particular mark and put it outside his store. So it has become a brand identifier on the Internet. CESARIO: I see. So how has Lexsynergy protected their brand online? GREENBERG: When we first started off we were very cost-conscious, so we started with a Google search and a free online trademark search, which you can do with several databases online, to see if anyone else was using the name Lexsynergy. It is an invented word that doesn't mean anything, so it's easier to protect. We then secured the domain name in all generic top-level domains, such as com, net, org, info, biz, tel (e.g. Lexsynergy(dot)com, Lexsynergy(dot)tel, etc), and in the countries where we trade or intended to trade. Country code top-level domains or ccTLD (e.g. Lexsynergy(dot)co(dot)uk or Lexsynergy(dot)us), we secured those. And once we had done those, we branched off and started to file trademarks to protect ourselves. And obviously, trademarks are more expensive so we did that at the end as the business grew. CESARIO: Those can be very expensive. How would you advise a business that doesn't have a lot of resources to protect their brands online? GREENBERG: I would start off by coming up with a unique name first, just to make sure that no one else in your particular industry is using that particular mark. I would also try to find an inventive word such as Google or Kodak -- those words that mean nothing. For instance, Apple is a very good trademark for computer products in a computer store, but a very poor trademark for a grocery store because it's descriptive of what it would be selling. So come up with a unique name, then do these online searches through social networking sites or search engines; and if they're available, go for the domain names, then go for the trademarks. And just remember trademarks are territorial, which means that you only get protection in the country in which you register the mark, and domain names are international, in that they give you international exposure. So I would advise to go that route.
Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand management specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a social media company that develops blogs, articles, videos & social media that drive traffic to your site. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.Brandsplat.com or visit our blog at http://www.ibrandcasting.com Note: You are free to reprint this article as long as the text links remain intact. Article Views: 23 Related Articles Five Ways To Remain Unproductive Have you ever sat down at your computer to write an article or get some work done only to have the time slip by and you have nothing accomplished? I have gradually been sucked into this trap recently and before I knew it my productivity had sunk to an all time low. Brand Management - Four Options For Focusing Your Newsletter Building on precious lessons of newsletter writing, this article highlights specific ways that a newsletter can be turned from a seemingly redundant tangent into a valuable marketing tool that speaks for itself while supporting the organization's core mission. List Building Secrets - Best Practices For Conducting Adswaps For List Buiding Ad-swapping is definitely not as easy as it appears on the outside. There are many things that both parties should consider first before sealing the deal, especially with regards to the benefits that this process will bring to them versus the possible fallout. And please understand that anytime to send an ad to a prospect for any reason, you are running the risk of fallout. 5 Simple Steps To Creating A Professional Looking Website Website designing can be a daunting obstacle if you are technically challenged. If your goal is to create a professional looking website, then you may wish to enlist the help of web design specialists. What Is Email Append And How Is It Useful? Email append is a very useful marketing tool, as it allows companies to reach potential clients or prospects with ever-increasing accuracy and cost effectiveness. An email append is the process of taking any business or consumer physical mailing address and appending an e-mail address to it. Choosing The Right Isp For Your Business - A Checklist If you're thinking of choosing an ISP for your business, have already done your research and found a list of prospective ISP companies, it's now time to think about what questions you have to ask them concerning your business' online presence. Online Brand Management- Optimizing Facebook We've previously discussed the Web's amazing tendency to take very good ideas and adapt them to techniques largely unrelated to their original intent. Search engines rate all websites based on their internal criteria, and this increasingly includes Social Media pages such as Facebook. With that in mind, let's consider five key ways you can apply SEO techniques to Facebook in order to drive interest. Learn All About Seo From Webmaster Forum Setting up a website is easy enough. But you must also learn how to promote the site. Otherwise, it's just a great looking site sitting there with no visitors. Without web visitors, you are definitely not going to make any sales. 5 Simple Steps To Write An Article For Submission Article writing and submission can bring you a lot of traffic. The only problem is, the writing and submission process takes time. But what if you can cut down your writing time by half? Getting Organic Traffic From Articles Article marketing is simple to understand. You just need to write articles and submit them to well established article directories. However, many Internet marketers shun this method because the process is tedious. |
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