The answer is TRUE! We had our quarterly “Hot Topic” lunch discussion at Godfrey today. The discussion was focused on managing your online brand identity in this social media era. A great example is the infamous Heinz story, where AdAge guest columnist Michael Werch created a twitter account using the Heinz name. It was all in the name of research, to see how long it would take a major brand to realize their identity had been hijacked.

We have had a few clients experience similar scenarios, where an affiliated partner or distributor have capitalized on a brand name, claiming it as theirs with Facebook or Twitter. These networks do of course have policies in place to prevent and correct such acts. 

Most of the instances we discussed today, the “imposters” weren’t necessarily using the brand name in a negative or bad way, just as in the Heinz example. But they definitely weren’t consistent or in alignment with the communications messaging that brand managers are focused on. It is important to be aware of all usage of your brand names in social media. Knowing what is out there is the first step to figuring out ways to capitalize on the positive, and responding appropriately to the negative.

There could be those that argue that they don’t feel their B2B audience is using Twitter, or Facebook. Regardless of if that is true, social media is very much present in search results. If your potential customer searches your brand name in Google, and the first few results they find are social media results by a brand hijacker – that could be a problem.

As Ken Jones discussed in his March blog post, it may not be within your company culture to talk about yourself, but somebody else could be doing it for you.