Your brand....someone elses domain name! What's going on?
Wednesday 12th May 2010
Your brand is everything to your business. It's like your electronic shop front. People should recognise it, associate it with you and your products or service, and even try to locate you by it.
When registering a domain name initially, all businesses are well advised to make sure that they can get their brand as their domain name. It makes sense as a lot of internet users will have a bash at sticking a .com or .co.uk on the end of your brand and seeing where it gets them. If you haven't already established a brand, this is something worth thinking about also when coming up with one.
So what happens when you have a brand, you have your domain name, but then someone else sneakily uses your brand as part of their domain? You can register your domain name, as well as your brand, as a trademark, but being a web company, we're not in much of a position to go throwing legal advice around.
What we can say is that you should be vigilant about the use of your brand by others, particularly where domains are concerned. Cybersquatting, as it is popularly known, sees unscrupulous characters using your brand in their domain name, or using a mis-spelled version of your domain name in order to divert traffic away from you, and towards them.
Brand monitoring is a way to keep on top of the way that your brand is being used by others, so that you are able to take action where you need to.
Posted on May 12th 2010 at 02:13pm
Labels: brand monitoring
