How To Protect Your Brand Online

Companies that want to protect their brand visibility on the web would do well to make optimizing their brand content as a best practice.

Once a negative mention has been identified, here are a few basic steps in dealing with it:

* Research the situation – is there merit?
* If not, provide the facts and ask for corrections
* If yes, then offer to discuss
* Be ready to respond with your own blog
* Be honest, be transparent and listen.

How To Monitor Your Brand Online

The simple way to find out what people are saying about your brand is to simply create a Google Alert so that you’ll get an email anytime your brand name is mentioned.
However, Google Alerts are limited - and aren’t designed to be an online brand management tool. That’s why you need to use a variety of online tools to find out what people are saying.

How to Choose Keywords to Monitor

When developing a method to monitor what people are saying about your brand(s) on the web, it’s important to think about all the various keywords people might be using.

Here are some keywords to think about monitoring:

* All your brand names
* Trademarks/copyrights
* Clients
* Competitors
* Spokesperson
* CEO (and other executives)
* Products
* Common misspellings, typos
* Company name abbreviations or initials

After you develop your list of keywords, it’s time to decide where
you’d like to monitor.

Where to Monitor Your Online Reputation

If you’re online reputation is important to you, it’s important to monitor all of the following on a daily basis:

* Blogs (particularly industry-related blogs)
* Twitter
* Social Media Sites
* Social networks (MySpace, Facebook)
* Wikipedia
* Blog Comments
* Message Boards, Forums, Threads
* Consumer Websites (RipOffReport, Consumerist)
* Article sites
* Video Sites (YouTube, Moveo)
* Photo Sites (Flickr, Google Picasa)
* Tags

Online Brand Management

Online Brand Management helps elevate, protect, and promote the organizations brand online. Companies are embracing brand reputation management as a strategic imperative and are increasingly turning to online monitoring in their efforts to prevent their public image from becoming tarnished. Online brand reputation protection can mean monitoring for the misappropriation of a brand trademark by fraudsters intent on confusing consumers for monetary gain. It can also mean monitoring for less malicious, although perhaps equally damaging, infractions, such as the unauthorized use of a brand logo or even for negative brand information (and misinformation) from online consumers that appears in online communities and other social media platforms.

How A Good Brand Name Should Be?

* Protected (or at least protectable) under trademark law.
* Easy to pronounce.
* Easy to remember.
* Easy to recognize.
* Easy to translate into all languages in the markets where the brand will be used.
* Ettract attention.
* Euggest product benefits (e.g.: Easy-Off) or suggest usage (note the tradeoff with strong trademark protection.)
* Suggest the company or product image.
* Distinguish the product's positioning relative to the competition.
* Attractive.
* Stand out among a group of other brands.

Brand management is the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand. It seeks to increase the product's perceived value to the customer and thereby increase brand franchise and brand equity. Marketers see a brand as an implied promise that the level of quality people have come to expect from a brand will continue with future purchases of the same product. This may increase sales by making a comparison with competing products more favorable. It may also enable the manufacturer to charge more for the product. The value of the brand is determined by the amount of profit it generates for the manufacturer. This can result from a combination of increased sales and increased price, and/or reduced COGS (cost of goods sold), and/or reduced or more efficient marketing investment. All of these enhancements may improve the profitability of a brand, and thus, "Brand Managers" often carry line-management accountability for a brand's P&L (Profit and Loss) profitability, in contrast to marketing staff manager roles, which are allocated budgets from above, to manage and execute. In this regard, Brand Management is often viewed in organizations as a broader and more strategic role than Marketing alone.

The annual list of the world’s most valuable brands, published by Interbrand and Business Week, indicates that the market value of companies often consists largely of brand equity. Research by McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm, in 2000 suggested that strong, well-leveraged brands produce higher returns to shareholders than weaker, narrower brands. Taken together, this means that brands seriously impact shareholder value, which ultimately makes branding a CEO responsibility.