Folks seem pretty excited about the Delta Airlines Twitter account (Jaffe, Waldman, AdPulp), although it's not clear whether Delta (or a maverick employee, or one of their agencies, or just some random person with a Delta fetish) is really behind the tweets. In any case, the fact that there is an active Twitter-er acting as a mouthpiece for the brand (and responding in real time to direct comments and questions from other Twitter users) is truly revolutionary. It either hints at the willingness of a large company (one that has had it's fair share of rough times lately, no less) to throw out the rulebook and jump into social media with both feet, or it shows just how far the balance of control has shifted (sanctioned or not, the Delta Twitter-er literally is the voice of the brand for anyone following his/her tweets.)
Now, all of this got me thinking -- if the Delta Twitter-er isn't affiliated with the airline and Twitter grows up to be a major social channel (the next big thing even), then what? Are we headed toward a replay of the days when large corporations found themselves negotiating with forward-thinking, profit-minded private citizens to reclaim control of their brands in these new channels?
With a quick check, I found parked Twitter accounts for both Coca Cola and Pepsi -- unfortunately both are parked by someone named "Chris," who may be counting on a future payday when those companies look to jump in for real (or perhaps works for one and registered the other preemptively.) A woman named Kinza Pinnix (pictured on the right) has registered twitter.com/chevy. It doesn't look like she's up to no good, but she doesn't seem to be "on brand" either. In fact, people have parked Twitter handles for many well-known brands. I can only hope that at least some of them were registered by forward thinking brand managers or agencies, but suspect many were registered by individuals not affiliated with the brands in any way.
Even if none of the registrants have done this with malicious intent or profit motive, it still raises a very real issue over brand ownership (or at least the ownership of brand names and trademarks.) And this isn't just about Twitter of course. How about Twitter's competitor Jaiku? Radar.net, Ustream.tv or Tumblr? The list goes on and on -- there are so many nascent social tools and many will most likely fizzle. But some won't -- some will become important communications platforms for whole segments of the wired population, and when that happens you might find that someone has been operating under your brand name.
This phenomenon is not unique to emerging social channels (it's not hard to find cases of individuals owning brand-related profiles in "old" new media properties like MySpace) and extends well beyond social media altogether -- how many of you have registered .mobi URLs to complement your .com and .net URLs?
Do you think it's time to start locking up our clients's trademarks across all of these new channels? I'd say yes, but maybe I just have an aversion to shelling out the money that puts some stranger's future kids through college. This is going to get interesting...
