Apr 18, 2009

Is it brandjacking if you come in late and don’t ask nicely?

Stephen Collins Posts 3 Australia, brandjacking, business, conversation, engagement, marketing, twitter

With all the atten­tion now sur­round­ing Twit­ter, it seems that every brand and celebrity under the sun sud­denly is or wants to be rep­re­sented on it and every other social net­work. It seems as if the busi­ness world has finally read Clue­train and wants to be in the bazaar engag­ing in the conversation.

But the fact is that while some brands have been engag­ing in the con­ver­sa­tion for quite some time — Zap­pos, Dell, Com­cast and oth­ers come to mind — oth­ers have only recently realised that this con­ver­sa­tion even exists. And worse, they don’t seem to realise that there are a few rules that define how you engage in that conversation.

We’re all aware of brand­jack­ing. It’s bad news when it hap­pens in a way that paints you and your organ­i­sa­tion in a bad light. When it hap­pens, it’s an almost inevitable PR dis­as­ter. It’s the brand related equiv­a­lent to iden­tity theft.

In Aus­tralia today, we’ve seen the local ver­sion of Vogue mag­a­zine go after a Twit­terer using the han­dle vogueaus­tralia. Vogue’s edi­tor Damien Wool­nough appears out­raged that some­one could have taken con­trol of his pre­cious brand so Vogue now have the vogue_​australia Twit­ter account.

Things didn’t start well at the new account, though. And for sev­eral reasons.

The first tweet on the vogue_​australia account read “smok­ing crack”. It has now been deleted. It still has just one tweet, point­ing to the News Lim­ited story, and no per­son­al­i­sa­tion. Not much con­ver­sa­tion going on there…

The holder of the vogueaus­tralia account has sug­gested that Vogue could have had the account if they had asked. That strikes me as a log­i­cal first step, yet Vogue, like many big brands, turned first to let­ters of demand and lawyers. Bad move, Vogue. Bad publicity.

I’m aware of at least one other huge Aus­tralian brand that is doing the same thing. As far as I know, they haven’t asked the account holder with their brand name if they can have the account, either. Auto­matic reac­tion — lawyers and terse emails to Twitter.

This isn’t play­ing the game well and goes to show that while there is a mas­sive land grab going on for brands in social net­works, many of them have yet to learn how to best play in the space. Either they are get­ting bad advice, or no advice at all. I’m not sure which is worse.

Yet, it worked for Con­nex. No mat­ter what you think of their abil­ity to run trains, they played this game well, ask­ing the for­mer account holder nicely for the account, and get­ting it.

Frankly, I have no sym­pa­thy for Vogue Aus­tralia. They look oppor­tunis­tic, jump­ing in on the lat­est fad for brands with­out under­stand­ing the estab­lished rules of engage­ment. They aren’t engag­ing in any con­ver­sa­tion. With any­one. They’re also late to the game. They could have been here a long time ago — the vogueaus­tralia Twit­ter account has only existed for a month.

They weren’t brand­jacked. Nobody was doing them any dam­age. They should sim­ply have asked nicely. That might just have worked.