Publishing Online Requires Protecting Your Brand

For anyone publishing online, one of the most important things affecting how well your product (articles, pictures, poems or some other product) sells is your brand name. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on articles, but it also works with many other products.

This makes it very important to protect your brand, which can be difficult online. While you may be to late to grab something really memorable, having a unique name, using it over and over, and doing your best to protect it can help you (more fame and money) in a number of ways:

• If a reader is used to reading your articles on Triond and likes them, then if they come across an account somewhere else with the same name, they will start reading those articles with a more favorable initial impression.

• If someone publishes bad work under the same name on a different site, then readers coming from that site will start reading your stuff with a bad initial impression.

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  In some cases, if a reader really likes your writing, they may look for more. If someone else is publishing bad articles with your name, the reader may end up getting those articles and deciding that you are not as worth while as they thought. This may result in them not searching for more of your work, or even not offering you something like freelance work.

• In most systems, if someone else starts using your name, you will never, ever (even years later) be allowed to publish on that site with your usual name.

• In one of the worst cases, if someone is publishing offensive articles with your name on them, then you may end up being punished (for example, if someone starts writing violently hateful things, people may get their friends to unite against it and anyone that they think is responsible).

• If someone creates an account in your name, they can occasionally get away with republishing your articles “under your name” in the hopes that anyone finding them will just assume that you republished them on that site as well. I recently happened to stumble onto someone doing this for my wife’s writing and when we started telling people, it turned out that it had happened to a number of authors. If I had not happened to find it, that person could have made money off several of the top Triond authors (frankly, I still doubt that they would have made enough money to make it worth while).

So, what can you do to protect yourself and your intellectual property?

• Treat your user name as much like a brand as possible and protect it where you can.

• Google your “brand” periodically. Ideally, the first page of a Google or Yahoo search should be all your stuff. Take a look at anything that is not yours. Of course if your name is not unique then good luck! Try searching for “Mark Bentley” and you will find that it is a common name. Putting quotes around your name will help limit hits where parts of your name appear in the article (i.e. filter out “published by: Mark Jordan and Kris Bentley”).

• Consider opening accounts now on systems that you might want to use later. Use a program like “KeyPass” (a free program that I use, but have no affiliation with) to keep track of your passwords. If I have an account on Associated Content, then at least I know that no one else is going to open an account in my name.

• Occasionally take the time to look for your best articles. You may find them in odd places (for example some Triond authors recently found their articles on Bukisa without permission.

• If you are just starting out, take the time to pick a unique name that will attract users. What do I mean?

• Well, my name is Mark Bentley. On most sites, I just keep using “mbentley” or “MarkBentley”, but more and more when I go onto an established site, those names are already taken. Opps. If I had thought about it, I could have something more unique like “mjbentleyTheGreatAndWonderful”. Chances are that I could get that name on most systems.

• This brings us to the second part of picking a name. Make it something that will attract users. You may think that “StudlyGuy1221” is a great name, but unless you just want to publish pick-up lines, you might want to think again. If you have to start putting numbers after it, maybe you should think again. I guess, if I was going to write tech articles, “TechGuyMark” might not be a bad one.

• If you find someone who is obviously trying to profit off you (i.e. republishing your work), make a lot of noise about it. These guys don’t want attention and most sites do not want you telling everyone that they steal work. If you ask (especially if you ask loudly) they will usually remove it. If they don’t you can at least make it obvious and make them look bad. Usually these sites are also worried about protecting their brand too.

• If all else fails, get even. One of the funnies things I have seen is a case where site B stole site A’s article and refused to take it down. Like most thieves they were lazy. They stole the whole article and the images still pointed to the original site. Site A re-named all the images in their article, then made all the original images subtly obscene (enough that you would notice if you read the article) with notes in them that they were stolen. Site B stole a really good article, but still ended up looking really stupid.

Keep in mind that while you will never catch every possible wrong, a little work can limit them quite a lot. Most of the people stealing work are doing it because they are just to lazy or stupid to do their own, so finding copies of the articles is often not as hard as you would think. The hard part is knowing what articles to look for in the first place.