Protecting Your Company's Brand Name Online

You've worked hard to create an identity for your company or products, so why no work just as hard at protecting it? With corporate identity theft on the rise, now is the time to build up a wall of security around your brand-name, in order to keep others from stealing or misusing it.

By having a website, it's easy for anyone to copy and paste your logo, text, and pictures - using it on their own website to further sales or perpetrate fraud. There have also been plenty of instances of an unscrupulous company using online blogs and forums to pose as customers bashing a competitor's business.

Luckily, the internet also makes it easy to keep tabs on your brand name and to make sure that it isn't being misused. Here are some ways you can protect your company and its brand name:

Regularly do an online search for your brand name - Take the time every month or every quarter to do a search on each of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) for your brand name and your company name. Check out any new blog or forum postings or any websites that are talking about your company or brand. If appropriate, respond positively to any negative postings. You may also want to take the time to trace the negative poster's email address - you just might find that it links back to a competitor! Also, do a separate search under Google images to see if any sites are stealing your logo or pictures for their own use. If you find that your images are being used without your permission, you can contact each website directly and ask them to remove your images.

Watermark your images - If you want to protect the images from your website, put a company watermark down on the lower corner. That will discourage most copiers from stealing your artwork or photography.

Protect your text - Because copying and pasting is so easy, lots of people do it without any regard for copyright laws. You can protect your website text by having your webmaster disable the right-click function on your webpage. Of course, seasoned web surfers know there are ways around this, but for 99% of your website visitors, this will be enough to stop any would be copyright infringers.

Look at your suppliers, vendors', clients', and retailers' websites - Oftentimes, it's the companies closest to you that end up misusing your brand name. You might enter one of your retailers' websites to find that they've taken it upon themselves to say they are the only factory-authorized retailer of your brand in the U.S., when in fact they are not. Or, you may find your logo and a made-up quote from you hyping up a vendor's services. Make checking the websites of the companies you deal with something that happens on a regular basis.

It doesn't take much time or effort to take back control of your brand name but, unfortunately, most companies never take the time to put such measures into place until it's too late. Both personal and corporate identity theft is on the rise and doesn't seem to be going away any time soon, so the most important thing you can do for your brand name is to protect it.