Brand Squatting

May 16th, 2008 at 10:26am Doug Burton

As if it weren’t enough that buying a domain name for you company’s Web site requires all sorts of linguistic acrobatics, creating an account with popular social networks and other online utilities is starting to be taxing as well. Pages at myspace.com/McDonald’s, GAP, Applebee’s, IBM, Xerox, Microsoft, Sony, iPhone and many others have little to do with the respective brands apart from the page owners’ usernames. Common dictionary words are long gone as well.

You don’t hear about brand squatting much, although there was a blog post last year comparing twittersquatting to the domain name rush of the 1990s. Why is it important to your organization? Three reasons.

1. Convenience. Blendtec Inc.. Their name on MySpace which is MySpace.com/myblendtec is less obvious than /blendtec, which is taken by someone other than the socially successful blender maker.
2. Danger of misrepresentation. It is easy to recognize /billgates and /microsoft as obvious parodies, but hijacking an online brand identity of someone less famous can’t be too hard.
3. Search traffic. Perhaps not a threat to bigger companies, but part of the search traffic for brands with limited online presence and for common words can be derailed to pages on MySpace, videos on YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. I don’t have a good “bad” example off the top of my head, but see how CBS YouTube channel ranks way above many of the network affiliates’ sites. And if you search for “tequila”, MySpace celeb Tila Tequila comes up above many businesses with the word in their names.

Entry Filed under: Tips & Tricks, Non-traditional advertising