It is possible to protect your Brand name in Google Adwords.

A nice example you find if you try to make a text-ad with the term  “Euro 2008″ in it. You get the following message (see picture):

Trademarked Term.

Due to trademark reasons we do not allow advertisers to use “Euro 2008″ in their Google Adwords ads.

If this is a wise decision for all brands, I don’t think so. It has an effect on your distribution which you should consider. However it can give you some Brand control.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to get relevant traffic to your website. You only pay a commission when this traffic is giving some result.

I always compare affiliate marketing with offline retail. Retail is making money by selling your product and keeping a part of the revenue. For Brands it is always wise to have this distribution channel in place. But just like with offline retail you must have a strategy.

When you are for example a luxury brand. You only want to see your product sold in exclusive shops. Otherwise you harm your brand. On the Internet this issue is even more relevant.

Good affiliate networks always let you, as advertiser, review each website to decide if a website is a suitable match for your brand. But still this is not enough. We have seen examples of big brands getting in very bad places. (check German examples here).

To prevent Brand damage you should always manage your affiliate programs properly. Is there anything strange going on in your program. Affiliateblog.nl (in Dutch) comes with a lot of things you should look at. In short, ask yourself this questions :

• Check your top-10 affiliates. Do you know them? Where do they get their traffic from?
• Check your stats. Are there any affiliates delivering huge amounts of traffic with a low conversion and/or high bounce rate?

To start with affiliate marketing in Switzerland you can start with Tradedoubler.
More basic info about affiliate marketing on wiki.

To get some inspiration it is always nice to look at award winning campaigns. This week I found the Webby awards in New York and the Belgian Cyber Lions Awards.

With the Webby Awards, NYtimes.com was the big winner also for the NYT style magazine video’s. The Obama “Yes We Can” video-clip is a winner. And The Onion wins seven awards for their webvideo’s and podcasts. (thank’s to webwereld.nl).

I think we can conclude that video is becoming really important these days. In this respect I like to get some special attention for Viva la Creation! (also a webby winner). It is a video remix project. With their tool called jumpcut, anybody can remix video.

When video remixing gets mainstream think about the possibilities for user generated content but also about again losing brand control. Anybody can take your video-commercial and make his/her own version.

In these days it is difficult to protect your brand against bad publicity. Everybody can say anything on any platform. It is impossible to dictate communications around your brand. Brands with the illusion of control are way behind. As explained on many other blogs bad news is spreading fast on the Internet. Much faster than good news. Here is a nice example of how to prevent this:

This Wednesday I was complaining about netvibes on twitter because netvibes seemed down for more than a day and I just had directed some prospects to my public page. Normally when I have something to say about a company I do notice them adding @company in my tweets. Never did I get any respond. It seems like most companies are using twitter for pushing in stead of interacting.

But with netvibes I did not. What they did is they noticed me complaining (using Twitter track I suppose) and asked me to get in contact. In10 minutes the problem was solved.

Think about what this did with my brand perception. And the perception of others following my tweets…