I had a rather odd incident occur yesterday where someone has claimed woofbarkwag (my blog about dogs) to be their site and set up a facebook group for it. I won’t be linking as trying to get this shut down. This incident brought home to me again the importance of your online presence and what is associated with your blogs.
As easy as entering a field in a social website
Setting up a group in facebook does not check if you are the owner of the website you input. Should it? I think seeing as this person put an email address (not a true one for woofbarkwag but still getting emails to my catch all from this) a simple send email to check could have been done in cases like this. Of course, if the person doesn’t put an email in this wouldn’t sort that out. How responsible should facebook even be in cases like this? I will find that out if I can even get this group shut down. It does open the whole can of worms around controlling your identity online. Can you really control anyone setting up a group around your blog and posting what they want – even in my case appearing to be the owner of my site.
Corporate obsession with identity ownership
Companies are often fixated on ‘owning’ their brand – from each domain name to patenting every piece of branding. Some of the larger companies even have employees monitoring the use of their brand. The lower end of the market has traditionally been more lax on this partially due to funds. In this digital world it is all too easy for someone to fake ownership of a site even if it is as in my case by creating a group on a social networking site. Flickr and social networks have kept us all ‘in the know’ about who is ripping our design off. However, cases like mine highlight as blog owners we should apply a bit more diligence over who is claiming ownership and creating things around our blog.
Why should you care it’s traffic and flattering?
I found out about this group through my traffic statistics, on seeing the referral I was rather surprised as to what I found. Some may say why should I care? Isn’t all traffic good? You should be flattered someone likes your blog this much? I disagree though, this is not a group I can control. Who is to say that my beliefs and foundations which my blog has will be followed by this group? I have no knowledge of this person and what their aims are. To be honest I’m simply puzzled as to their ‘gain’ from this. That aside, this is group that can have a negative or positive impact on my blog – the fact that I can not control which direction it goes is a problem. Couple this with the fact that only if you know me or read the blog about page (only a small percentage of traffic would), would you even know this person who created the group did not own and write on woofbarkwag. They are basically handing in homework to teacher which I have written and saying they did it. I do not find any of these reasons flattering. It’s one thing to be asked and another to have someone do this without your knowledge – costs nothing to email the blog owner.
Making yourself more aware
The bottom line this has taught me is that you have to be more vigilant about what your blog is being linked to. All bloggers are aware of their content being syndicated without them knowing – how many have thought to search facebook and other social networks to see what is being linked to your blog? My case I do find a bit odd as there is no obvious ‘gain’ to this person in doing this. Woofbarkwag is a small blog only just been admitted to 9rules and off most radars as slowly building up. The point isn’t muted by it being a smaller blog though, it raises issues all bloggers should be aware of.
As for action, I have contacted a few people at facebook along with the ‘owner’ of this group – not surprised by their so far lack of response. All I can hope is that this will be resolved and the group taken down this week along with suitable preventions being made by facebook.
I understand your want to control activity around your brand but what right do you have to have a Facebook group closed?
The URL field is not exclusive and does not show ownership – it’s just a point of reference from the group.
For example: I could start a[nother] “I love Apple” group — I don’t but that’s irrelevant — and I would likely link to Apple.com. Apple wouldn’t be able to close it because it’s clearly not officially representative of Apple.
Just because you own a brand, it doesn’t mean you get to control all activity where it’s used. If there’s copyright or trademark abuse, then you’ve a case, otherwise, no.
Oli the point is though if someone set up a group claiming they were apple as in not just linking to the site but giving an email address that was name@apple.com. That would be comparing like with like in my case as this is what has happened.