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In today’s digital times, it is getting increasingly difficult to protect your brand. The brand that you have spent years building, a brand that has built a global (or even local) throng of followers and along with that a stellar reputation is at risk. And within a short time, it will be in even more dangerous online territory as hundreds more gTLDs become available. So, it only makes sense that now more than ever, you consider implementing an online brand protection software. In this post I will go into the top five reasons your business should use a brand protection software and the challenges it answers.

Time Saving & Cost Efficiency

As a brand, you know how much time you spend protecting your brand from online threats and you notice it is taking up much of your time. Because of this, your brand may be suffering. Manually checking affiliate sites that are misrepresenting your brand, contacting violators, seeking out Cyber and Typo Squatters, scanning for counterfeiters, trademark infringements, those stealing your traffic….. The list goes on and on…It takes much of your time. Now, imagine having to document each one of the violations in the aforementioned categories. There is not enough time in the day to even do that.

Time saving is inextricably tied to cost efficiency. Your work and those of your staff doesn’t come cheap. Think of all the time you’d be saving if you didn’t have to manually protect your brand. Then calculate that into currency. You’ll be surprised and almost definitely disappointed at the results. There are companies that have solutions but those solutions are not good enough. Additionally, many brands use external vendors, which only adds to the cost, both in internal manpower as well as paying for the time used by the vendor. No one knows your brand and online history better than you.

By using a system that is set up according to your business’ needs in-house you need not worry about scanning reports for information, not stopping a diversion of your traffic to a competitors’ site in time, people pirating your marketing campaigns. it will give you the freedom to do what you do best in advancing your company’s mission.

Monitoring

As quick and sharp as some marketing managers are, nothing beats the power of a tool that utilizes an algorithmic approach to constantly monitor online threats to your brand. Because let’s face it, there are a lot of them, sometimes lurking in the far reaches of cyberspace, sometimes appearing out of nowhere, ready to pounce on whatever brand, whenever by their masters.

With brand monitoring and alerts, you can stop these threats dead in their tracks.

Data Mining

With the introduction of so many gTLDs, the Internet is going through a metamorphosis not seen since its inception. Pretty soon there will be an infinite amount of Internet nooks and crannies where cyber pirates, counterfeiters and outright thieves can operate and exploit your brand in the worse ways possible. To do the mining on data extracted from all these potential sites manually, you’d probably need a few years, not a few hours.

You need a tool that will accurately and efficiently collect information from across the internet based on your preferences, analyze it and present it to you in a way that you can easily understand.

Prioritization

With so many violations happening all the time, non-stop against your brand, weeding out the lesser threats from the more potent ones is in itself a chore of gargantuan proportions.

It is only something that can be done using a brand protection solution that identifies threats and sifts through all of them utilizing highly sophisticated algorithms. Once that is done, it needs to be presented to you via an interface that is easy to comprehend. Then, create a game plan on how to strategize and remedy these threats.

Your Reputation

Brand reputations come and go like the change of the seasons. Your reputation is at risk and that ultimately is what Brand Protection Software aims to protect. Reputation is not something you can put a price on.

I’d like to end this post with some numbers that will further inspire you to seek out a brand protection solution.

• $3.4 billion lost to online fraud in 2011
• $130 billion lost in online counterfeit sales
• Over 4 million websites are “parked domains” (advertising websites) that mainly profit from brand exploiting
• Example: In 2010 Ralph Lauren lost $780k a month through 6000 infringing websites