Below is live coverage of the Brand, Trademark & Reputation Management from the SES San Jose 2009 conference.
This coverage is provided by Chris Boggs of Rosetta & Keri Morgret of Strike Models.
We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. You can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.
| Brand, Trademark & Reputation Management | (08/13/2009) |
| 12:44 | Keri Morgret: Now that Google has lifted the ban on trademark terms in search ads, should we expect an immediate influx of brand names in Google keyword ads? Should you use a competitor's trademark in your own search advertising? Or what if a competitor has an ad running on your trademarked brand name? Is it worth engaging professional legal help or are there other options? What if bloggers are posting negative or false claims about your brands, and these are spreading with viral speed through other blogs? Are there ways to get these damaging messages out of the search engines? This session will provide an exploration of these and other brand protection issues.
Speakers:
Lori Weiman, CEO, The Search Monitor
Brian Kaminski, EVP, Managing Director, iProspect
Simon Heseltine, Senior Marketing Manager, AOL, LLC
Paul Elliott, Partner - Search & Media / Analytics & Optimization, Rosetta
Mark Rosenberg, Of Counsel, Sills Cummis & Gross P.C. |
| 12:45 | Keri Morgret: Paul Elliott is starthing things off for this session. |
| 12:46 | Keri Morgret: For online reputation management, you need to monitor and protect your prand. |
| 12:47 | Keri Morgret: He'll be sharing case studies with us today. |
| 12:47 | Keri Morgret: Understanding the impact that search results can have on the brand. Looking at Diet Coke and SERPs. |
| 12:48 | Keri Morgret: They haven't done a good job understanding and/or impacting their results. |
| 12:48 | Keri Morgret: User generated content and PPC increases amount of negative results. |
| 12:50 | Keri Morgret: Negative Brand Impact Does Not Always Require the Acts of Others. |
| 12:52 | Keri Morgret: Poorly managed SERPs provide substantial opportunity for manipulation. Paul had a bad experience with a construction contractor, able to directly impact SERPs and their business in about 24 hours by using ripoffreport, yahoo local, etc. Company hadn't been proactive in their SERPs. |
| 12:52 | Keri Morgret: National City Bank is not the official name of the company, and they were reluctant to use that phrase in their meta tags, content. Google instead chose what to show in description, so they showed "not bank guaranteed" . |
| 1:01 | Keri Morgret: Wifi in the room has died so I'm covering from my phone until it returns. |
| 1:02 | Keri Morgret: Kaminski is talking about peoples' responses to google trademark changes. |
| 1:03 | Keri Morgret: He's going over googles guidelines. |
| 1:04 | Keri Morgret: Advertises were excited. Trademark owners were worried. |
| 1:05 | Keri Morgret: Compared two pre and post six week periods to see what impact this had. |
| 1:06 | Keri Morgret: Performance impact on branded keywords was negligible |
| 1:06 | Keri Morgret: Little to no change in position |
| 1:07 | Keri Morgret: No sig increase in competitors incorporating trademarked terms into their copy |
| 1:08 | Keri Morgret: Cautions that this is small data set and will be interesting to see what happens as time goes on |
| 1:09 | Keri Morgret: Still need to have game plane, monitor brand. Focus on ad differentiation. Set rules for your affiliates and enforce them. |
| 1:10 | Keri Morgret: Advertisers: get into the game. |
| 1:11 | Keri Morgret: He can get you white papers and data. |
| 1:12 | Keri Morgret: Simon from aol is now up. And I'm still on the phone. |
| 1:13 | Keri Morgret: Need to worry about more than just SERPS. |
| 1:14 | Keri Morgret: Forums are one example, and they're often not index esp for private forums. |
| 1:15 | Keri Morgret: Might miss mentions because of abbrevations. |
| 1:17 | Keri Morgret: Gives example of united and breaking guitars. |
| 1:18 | Keri Morgret: Review site can show good in SERPS but could be bad reviews that don't show in SERPS. |
| 1:18 | Keri Morgret: You need to work on your listening abilities |
| 1:20 | Keri Morgret: Need to also focus on employees. Example of dominoes pizza. |
| 1:22 | Keri Morgret: Examples of sports stars behaving badly on twitter |
| 1:22 | Keri Morgret: Respond as posiively as you can. |
| 1:23 | Keri Morgret: If you respond with a lawsuit it will likely go live online. |
| 1:24 | Keri Morgret: Doing it right can turn a negative experience into a positive one. |
| 1:25 | Keri Morgret: Know when to walk away. Flame wars and trolls. Don't post fake reviews. |
| 1:27 | Keri Morgret: Laurie weiman upnow. Talking about affiliates. |
| 1:28 | Keri Morgret: Her company monitors search results and looks at advertisers. See if affs are dollowing toc. |
| 1:28 | Keri Morgret: STILL no Internet on desktop for me |
| 1:29 | Keri Morgret: Direct linking is a problem |
| 1:29 | Keri Morgret: This can drive up CPC |
| 1:30 | Keri Morgret: Can drive down roi |
| 1:32 | Keri Morgret: How to find these direct linkers. Manually is one option. Can be thwarted by geotargeting and dayparting. |
| 1:32 | Keri Morgret: Quantify impact by charting ad frequenxy |
| 1:35 | Keri Morgret: Other problems. Expired offers. You and competitor on same landing page. Affiliate not part of network anymore still advertises and goes to bad landing page (they forget to take ad down) |
| 1:35 | Keri Morgret: Not all bad. Affs can help block out competiton. |
| 1:36 | Keri Morgret: Brand hijacking. |
| 1:38 | Keri Morgret: What to do. Go to search engines. Legal actions. |
| 1:40 | Keri Morgret: Attorney is up now. |
| 1:41 | Keri Morgret: When to call lawyer. Nonlegal mesures don't work. Time is of the essence. You need to go nuclear. |
| 1:42 | Keri Morgret: And I'm back on the laptop! Let's hope this works for a while. |
| 1:42 | Keri Morgret: Before you get a lawyer involved:
Not all unauthrized trademark use is illegal. |
| 1:43 | Keri Morgret: Sales of genuine trademarked product.
Sales of generic version of trademarked product
Legimitate comparision between trademarked product and a competitor's product. Statement needs to be true. |
| 1:43 | Keri Morgret: Can be used in truthful opinion and commentary. Emphasis on truthful. |
| 1:44 | Keri Morgret: Use of the trademark must be limited to what is necessary to identify the trademarked product. Can't cause undue attention to the trademark. |
| 1:44 | Keri Morgret: Google's new trademark policy pretty much tracks what is permitted by the law. |
| 1:46 | Keri Morgret: There are problems with Google's policy.
- Finding it! Didn't find it on Google's site, then did a search for the trademark policy, then had to do three clicks in for link.
- Allows purchase of trademark as a keyword. Means you can be bidding against competitors.
- Relies on honor system
Rosetta Stone filed a lawsuit against Google.Rosetta Stone does radio ads with well-known taglines. Competitors bid on these taglines (taglines all registered trademarks). |
| 1:48 | Keri Morgret: Articles and commentary:
Applies to lots of places: mainstream media, blogs, forums, etc.
First Amendment protects opinion.
Truth is an absolute defense. If there's a roach in the soup and you can prove it, there's nothing you can do from a legal standpoint.
But if it's materially false, that is not a protected opinion but defamation.
Parody is protected. United can't do anything about the guitar video because it's parody. There is a fine line with parody, can become defamation. |
| 1:50 | Keri Morgret: When it's time for an attorney.
- Your rights are being violated.
- Non-legal measures are not working.
- You know in advance that non-legal measures are pointless. |
| 1:50 | Keri Morgret: - violation needs to stop immediately. |
| 1:51 | Keri Morgret: Why go to an attorney?
- Gets the bad guy's attention. Lets them know that people are serious. Once the attorney is involved things are one step closer to litigation.
- ISP's, registrars and host often more willing to cooperate with an attorney's request than just regular person.
- You can't wait to see if hte non-legal measures are going to work. |
| 1:52 | Keri Morgret: Example of Saturday Night Live, City of New York got Saturday Night Live for a parody. |
| 1:52 | Keri Morgret: What can an attorney do for you?
- Ability to go to court
- Preliminary injunction (can get some action before formal court date) |
| 1:52 | Keri Morgret: Examples of McNeil Labs v. Pfizer, Bose Corp. v. Silsonnic |
| 1:53 | Keri Morgret: - Attorney can do discovery, help figure out who other person is (like with ISP). |
| 1:53 | Keri Morgret: Q&A time. If my internet connection fails, I'm not going to be able to cover this via the iPhone. |
| 1:56 | Keri Morgret: Discussing what you can do about reviews. Sometimes if there's just a couple of negative reviews and a whole bunch of positive, it may not be bad. There is some research saying a bad/neutral review might not hurt things much. |
| 1:57 | Keri Morgret: In the UK it's illegal to do a review with a false name. |
| 1:58 | Keri Morgret: And the session is now over. |
| 1:58 | 
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