Social Media Brand Protection Best Practices

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overview

More than six billion user accounts and two billion active users are estimated to use 10 social media platforms, generating a vast amount of (generally unmoderated) content every day. As brand owners will attest, a proactive social media infringement monitoring program is critical to protecting intellectual property rights on these sites. We explain how Questel’s online brand protection solution can support you in setting up an effective social media brand protection strategy.

Social media infringement monitoring requires brand owners to have access to a crawler for real-time data, as well as investigators to infiltrate closed groups, accounts, and services to reveal abuse that is not publicly available. As complaint procedures and types differ between social media platforms, brand owners also need to make use of an exhaustive range of escalation measures to adequately protect their brand from abuse.

Our online brand protection solution detects entities or individuals across social media sites that take unfair advantage of your brand or advertise illicit goods, as well as abandoned distributor, subsidiary, and company profiles that may violate your social media guidelines. As importantly, our expert team works with each client individually to tailor our strategy to their exact needs using the following two-step process.

Two Steps to Social Media Brand Protection

Step 1: Detection

As part of the social media monitoring module of our online brand protection service, we:

Undertake real-time monitoring of account names and public posts relating to your brand across 10 social media platforms.
Identify and infiltrate risky groups or profiles set as private.
Filter results and apply proactive identification of infringement using human intelligence [1].
Provide a quarterly review of 20+ major social media sites to ensure the focus remains on the biggest issues.

Step 2: Investigation & Enforcement

We are experienced in an exhaustive range of escalation measures across social media platforms. These include educational messages to content owners, systematic take-downs as well as platform guideline violation complaints. Through our case management and take-down brand protection system (CMS), our experts will make use of social media brand protection identifiers, such as account names, contact information, and images, to reveal more cases, and if needed, collect additional evidence of abuse. Once the scope of the abuse has been established, our experts will send complaints through CMS to the social media platform or content owner.

Meet Our Social Media Experts

Thomsen Trampedach, our center of excellence for online brand protection, can also assist with Social Media Username Landscape reports that provide an overview of already registered usernames across 40+ social media sites. You will receive a list of taken and available usernames together with an expert recommendation on possible next steps [1].

Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Monitoring

What is Social Media Infringement Monitoring?

Social media infringement monitoring aims to detect occurrences of abuse of a brand owner's trademarks and related intellectual property rights across social media platforms. As part of this monitoring component, we crawl all major Social Media platforms across the globe periodically looking for all new content mentioning our clients' intellectual property or utilizing protected imagery.

What is Included in the Social Media Monitoring Module?

Our online brand protection module for social media infringement monitoring includes:

Setting up a web crawler that searches for keywords, phrases, and keyword combinations in real-time.
Monitoring of most important copyright images (product photos, logos, etc.). The crawler searches for identical images.
Follow on possible leads and interact with potential counterfeiters for further intelligence gathering.
All cases will be added to our case management and take-down brand protection system, pre-assessed by our subject matter experts to avoid any time wasted on irrelevant results.
Quick and efficient enforcement of all types of social media abuse.
Agreed KPIs and 24/7 reporting.

Why are Online Investigators Necessary?

A web content crawler can't find everything on the internet; it definitely cannot single out all the abuse of a brand. A web crawler needs to be configured in a way that reveals relevant results. Therefore, we always add professional online investigation work mimicking consumer behavior, following up on hints that can lead us to the source of the problem, and, most importantly, using our human intuition to reveal abuse overseen by the crawler. This way, when identifying abuse, we can go back to the configuration of the crawler and reconfigure it, so it reveals more accurate results.

What are the Biggest Social Media Risks for My Brand?

Social media infringement monitoring mainly focuses on cases of false impersonation or affiliation that could reflect badly on the brand reputation, but also sales of counterfeit goods. More and more often producers of counterfeit goods rely on social media for the promotion of their items: the sales are conducted via platforms’ direct messaging systems or by phone, utilizing payment providers that guarantee their anonymity. Removing all posts infringing on a brand's IP significantly impacts counterfeiters’ business models and protects the brand’s overall reputation and value.

Interested in a Free Trial of Our Social Media Brand Protection Module?

We help dozens of brands with social media infringement monitoring. Contact us for a demo or sign up now for a 3-month trial of our online brand protection solution.

[1] Questel does not provide any legal services. Legal services are provided by independent IP attorneys on the basis of a separate engagement agreement between you and, if you wish to, a partner IP attorneys firm.