From do-it-yourself to big budget, you have options in how to track the discussion of your company online. VeriSign's Mike Denning plugs the specialized reputation-monitoring companies for defending your brand online:
Get involved in protecting your brand's online presence. You can't leave brand reputation monitoring to an intern and a search engine. Even your Legal/IP team can't do it alone. They can be the first line of defense, but there is no substitute for a specialized, automated system that combines human analysis, ongoing incident tracking, and abuse/misuse identification throughout the Internet. There are products and services at every price range, and the annual cost is generally less than a single marketing initiative for the average large company.
I was curious about what VeriSign might be doing with brand monitoring. The article seems to describe the type of reputation monitoring we've been discussing, but when I looked, I learned that they offer a different kind of reputation monitoring, based on protecting your brand among Internet domain registrations.
This is actually an older threat: someone outside your company—competitor, critic, or criminal—registers a domain that could be confused with your company and does something you wouldn't want associated with your brand. The old companysucks.com ploy is a variation; there's no need to make it so easy for your critics when it's cheap and easy to register the anti-brand domains. Top-level domains other than .com create other opportunities for those who would misuse your marks. VeriSign's white paper (registration required) suggests some other ideas on what you need to do to protect yourself in the domain name arena.
Oh, the enabling power of the Internet. How many ways can people use it to damage your company? The more you look, the more there is to find.
