Attempting to navigate the USPTO trademark registration process is a headache – anyone who’s ever tried it will tell who how much time and effort it takes.  Even searching the USPTO government website for a mark can be difficult – so we wanted to make both processes easier for the brand owner.  Our trademark search is uniquely simple – just enter a brand name, and we’ll show you if it’s available for registration or if someone has already trademarked it.  If it is available, for only $158 (plus the standard $325 USPTO Filing Fee) our partner TMarque will put their professional attorneys to work for you, saving you hours of time and effort wrangling with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office).

With the addition of our Trademark search and registration, KnowEm now offers a complete suite of branding tools – including our Domain name search and registration service along with our original Social Media username search and registration service.  So if you have a brand you want to secure and keep consistent on the web, all you have to do is visit KnowEm.com.  We’ll secure your brand name on up to 300 Social Media sites, any Domain extensions you want (over 150 to choose from), and now we’ll even trademark your brand for you.  We think that’s pretty easy, but if we can make it any easier for you, just let us know — we’re still listening!

According to Microsoft’s new statement, they are only ceasing investigations to the U.S. and Canada on PPC trademark buying, but obviously they could expand their list of regions in the future also.

So what does Microsoft suggest you do if someone is buying your trademarked term, misrepresenting your brand, and stealing your customers?  According to their new Intellectual Property Guidelines, “If there is concern that an advertiser may be using a trademark keyword inappropriately, the trademark owner should contact the advertiser directly.”  So now the onus is on trademark owners to spend the time, effort, money and litigation to exert the government-granted right they paid for to protect a trademark.  This is basically the same stance Google has been taking for a while now.

Of course, one can readily see why both Microsoft and Google don’t want to be the gatekeepers on PPC trademark rights – they want more advertising money.  By opening the flood gates to allow illegal trademark purchasing, they can get a lot more competitors buying click terms.  Pepsi can buy Coca Cola, and Ford can buy Nissan.  It’s up to the trademark owners to battle it out in court.

If you’re a trademark attorney representing a major brand, you will now have to be ever more vigilant in policing the web for cases of trademark infringement.   And if you’re an SMB out there trying to create a brand and protect a trademark on the search engines?  It’s the wild west out there now, and anything goes unless you have the money to take every competitive PPC buyer to court.

He reports that these social signals are used relatively lightly for now, but may begin to influence more heavily in the future as they gauge their effectiveness over time.  Something Google also wants to look at in terms of ranking influence is not just the number of social followers or friends a user may have, but the quality of those friends.  Obviously, just like they want to weed out spam and automated links to pages, Google also wants to weed out social accounts which are little more than bots or have artificially inflated their follower count.

So what does this mean to business and brand owners interested in leveraging social media for search engine rankings?  Really nothing, if you’ve already developed a smart and effective social media strategy. It just means Google is finally catching up to you.  If you haven’t begun to develop a social media strategy, then this should just be one more very strong reason to begin getting involved.

Since Twitter has a policy against name squatting and selling usernames, you have to wonder what Twitter thinks of this deal.  Their policy states “attempts to sell, buy, or solicit other forms of payment in exchange for usernames are also violations and may result in permanent account suspension.”  Israel Meléndez says they didn’t violate this clause because he was just relinquishing his own personal account, he didn’t create the account for the purposes of making a profit.  Other reports state Twitter actually helped facilitate the sale, but Twitter hasn’t confirmed that.

At KnowEm we have clients inquiring every day about what they can do to get their company’s brand, trademark or username back if it has already been taken on a social network.  We always advise them to use the proper channels and contact the website owner to ask about their policy in reclaiming names, which usually requires some lawyers to get involved.  The truth is, however, that it can be a very difficult and time-consuming process.  And as this story shows us, you might not get the outcome you want.

If the nation of Israel had to pay a six figure sum to reclaim their name on Twitter, what chance do you have of getting your branded username back if it’s already been taken?  This is the primary reason a professional service like KnowEm is so valuable for brand and trademark owners who want to be proactive in Social Media.  Think of it as brand insurance – no one can steal or squat on your name on the next big social network if you have already registered it.

This article has been republished from the KnowEm blog.

Typosquatting on domain names is not a new practice on the internet; it was clearly identified as a threat as early as 1995 by the Federal Trademark Dilution Act and targeted directly in 1999 with the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act which “established a cause of action for registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name confusingly similar to, or dilutive of, a trademark or personal name.” Eventually ICANN also established the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) for further protection against domain name squatting.

Like defensive domain registrations to prevent cybersquatting, trademark owners should acquire a company name, any trademarks, and any other important intellectual property brands on all social network sites.
Traverse Legal, 9/21/09

While this helps protect trademark owners from issues with misspelled domain names, there isn’t really anything in place yet which protects them on social networks. This was evidenced as early as a year go by reports concerning name misspellings being bought and sold on Twitter, and not just as usernames, but by API names as well. It seems wherever a user can supply content on a social network, there is the possibility of that content’s true owner being misrepresented.
So what can trademark owners do to protect their brands? They can wait until after their name has been squatted and issue a cease and desist to each social network and try and recover it, or they can use a service like KnowEm to proactively register their mark on popular social networks. For purposes of full disclosure I will point out that I am a co-founder of KnowEm, and I am happy to stand behind our service as the first and foremost social networking trademark protection firm on the internet.

You don’t necessarily have to rush out and use a professional service to protect misspellings of your trademark on every social network, but at the least you should consider monitoring not only the usage of your brand or mark, but several misspellings as well. Typosquatting has been around since domains existed and there’s no reason to believe it will go away anytime soon, especially with the continuing popularity and growth of social networks.

This post has been republished from the KnowEm blog.

We’re very pleased to announce today that we’ve added 20 new international TLDs (top-level domains) to our free service which checks domain name availability, bringing our total number of domain extensions searched to over 60. The new domains are a result of our continued commitment to provide marketers, trademark specialists, and branding managers a one-stop shop for everything related to branding. Whether you’re looking to brand yourself personally, or find that perfect domain name for your business or client, we’re pretty confident that KnowEm is the only place like it for all your branding needs.

List of New Top-Level Domain Extensions (check for availability):

NET.BZ
NET.BR
COM.MX
ORG.AG
COM.BZ

COM.ES
NOM.ES
ORG.ES

FIRM.IN
IND.IN
ORG.IN
NET.NZ
ORG.TW
CO.IN
GEN.IN
NET.IN
CO.NZ
ORG.NZ
COM.TW
IDV.TW

Of course, we also still search over 400 social media networks to find the availability (or usage) of your trademark, brand, or personal username. And we still offer our unique Automated Username Signup packages, with which our local staff can secure your brand on up to 300 social networks. (Every member of KnowEm’s signup staff is under strict NDA and has had criminal background checks to ensure your sensitive information is always protected).

Company launches new services to help enterprises and individuals stake out their names on more than 300 social media sites today — as well as those sites to emerge tomorrow

KnowEm, the company working to help brands manage their identity across the social web, launched a new family of premier services designed to further help Fortune 500 corporations and small businesses alike stake their claim in the ever-changing social media landscape. Additionally, the company announced that it has recently acquired FriendsCall.Me, a service that enables companies to manage their personal brands on the web, for an undisclosed amount.

Both KnowEm and FriendsCall.Me launched in April 2009 and quickly grew their client bases — reflecting a strong growth in social media-conscious companies, along with the need to take charge of identity in the social web. FriendsCall.Me was the brainchild of Darius A Monsef IV, the creator of the popular design community, COLOURlovers.com, and community organizer for Microsoft’s Photosynth.com.

Existing FriendsCall.Me customers will automatically be transferred to KnowEm’s service. By leveraging the synergistic technology and functionality of FriendsCall.Me, KnowEm can enhance their service offerings to create further opportunities in social media identity management.

“Much like with domain names, there’s now a race to create identities in social media,” explained KnowEm co-founder, Barry Wise. “But managing identities in social media is far more complex than securing a domain name. There are hundreds of popular social networks, with new sites popping up each day. It’s a challenge enough for companies to keep track of where they have a presence, not to mention the time-consuming work of creating profiles where they don’t.”

For no charge, KnowEm lets brand owners instantly check the availability of their branded usernames and keywords on more than 330 popular social media networks. Sites range from well-known networks like Twitter and YouTube, to influential niche networks in Blogging, News, Community, Entertainment, Photo, Travel, Health, and other categories. KnowEm returns a list of social networks where the brand is and isn’t registered — and then takes it a step farther by automatically securing names, even creating profiles, on all these sites.

KnowEm has been offering its services in beta since April, and has been working with a wide range of clients — including a major search engine, large pharmaceutical company, restaurant chains, as well as mom-and-pop businesses. Over 200,000 profiles have already been secured and created through KnowEm.

KnowEm’s newly announced services include:

• Business Edition ($249): This premium, time-saving service creates profiles on the top 100 social media websites (150 sites for $349), including a complete signup and posting of basic information — photos, bio, URL, and description. As a result, companies can make sure their brand name is protected and initiate their social media presence without the tedious work of manually signing up for each and every network. Each signup and profile creation receives the personal touch of KnowEm’s staff in New Jersey — there’s no automation or offshore labor involved.
• Individual Edition ($99): KnowEm kick starts the signup process by initiating profile creation on the top 150 social media websites. The business owner will then need to confirm and populate each profile to complete the process.
• Subscription Plan ($49/month):  This monthly service continues to protect a brand or username on up to 30 new and emerging social media networks every month. As a result, companies can stay in front of the social media landscape and make sure their territory is staked out on the next Twitter before it’s too late.

“Since our beta launch in April, we’ve seen a strong demand from companies of all sizes and these new services are a direct result from their input,” said Michael Streko, co-founder of KnowEm. “We’re committed to making it as easy as possible for companies to make sure their identities are protected and they’re participating across the full scope of today and tomorrow’s social sites.”

The company also announced that social media pioneers Paige Craig and Brian Solis have joined the KnowEm Advisory Board.

Anyone can visit www.knowem.com to start managing their social media identity today.

About KnowEm

KnowEm.com (http://knowem.com) monitors hundreds of popular websites for social media identity theft. By entering a username, which can be a brand name, internet identity, or vanity URL, KnowEm.com allows you to instantly monitor the availability of that username on over 300 popular social media websites such as Twitter, MySpace and Digg.

2) Free Giveaways/Promotions.  That’s right – Google will also penalize you for asking other blogs to link to you in a free promotion or giveaway.  In their eyes it’s just like buying links. I’ve done it, and I’ve seen it.
SOLUTION: Ask any blogger doing a promotion or giveaway for you to nofollow their links.

A former Google Quality Rater writes “If you publish a product review or giveaway and you don’t no-follow your links, Google will penalize both you and the company that sponsored your blog post.”

3) Uncloaked Affiliate links.  Why does Google hate affiliates?  It seems Google hates just about anything commercial – if it makes you money, Google doesn’t like it.  Unless of course you’re paying Google, as in buying Adwords for PPC.  Then they love you.  Not cloacking your affiliate links can cost you in the SERPs.  I’ve done it, and I’ve seen it.
SOLUTION: Cloak the links — 301 redirects work great — and nofollow them.

4) Linking to Spammy and Shady Sites.  Watch those commenters you allow to place dofollow comments on your blog – if you get enough people linking to sites which sell Viagra and pr0n via hacked links you’ll get slammed for linking out to bad neighborhoods.
SOLUTION: Moderate your comments, nofollow links, or both.  Others more experienced than I have blogged about it.

5) Inactivity.  The search engine landscape is changing all the time – if you’re not constantly working on promoting or building your site chances are it’s going to slip in the SERPs. You can’t just put up a 5 page brochure/pamphlet site and expect visitors to find you.   You have to work at it.
SOLUTION: Work at it.

6) Duplicate Content.  OK, this one won’t destroy your site, but it’s not going to help it any.  If your site suffers from internal duplicate content issues search engines may not be returning the pages you want visitors to see.  If your site has duplicate issues with content previously published on other websites, you may not appear at all.
SOLUTION: Nofollow links to duplicate content, block it in robots.txt, and/or use the new Google Canonical tag to specify the authoritative source.

I just launched a new website, the next iteration of CheckUserNames.com.  KnowEm.com not only checks for the availability of your username on 120 sites, for a small fee we’ll stake your claim on every one of them by automatically signing you up.

KnowEm.com (http://knowem.com) launched a new web service today which monitors hundreds of popular websites for social media identity theft. By entering a username, which can be a brand name, internet identity, or vanity URL, KnowEm.com allows you to instantly monitor the availability of that username on over 120 popular social media websites such as Twitter, MySpace and Digg.

“Social Media identity theft is the modern form of domain name squatting,” says KnowEm co-founder, Barry Wise. “10 years ago it was a race to get CompanyName.com. Today it’s a race to secure a brand name on sites such as Twitter, which is quickly becoming an amazing tool for both brand transparency and customer service.”

A quick check today revealed that some of the biggest brands in the world have still not secured their account name to protect their brand from identity theft. For example, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Pepsi (NYSE:PEP), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Exxon (NYSE:XOM) and Citigroup (NYSE:C) still show that dozens, and in some cases over 80%, of popular social media websites still list their brand names as available account names.

It’s not just major media brand names that have dropped the ball — many celebrities have not secured their online identity either. Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey’s recent exposure on the popular new microblogging service Twitter.com has shown that celebrities are taking interest in using social media as a vehicle for PR and communication. But as of today their Twitter screen names, @aplusk and @oprah, are still both available on almost 90% of other websites on KnowEm.com’s list.

“The time is coming when online reputation management is critical even for normal citizens. You would be surprised how many companies are now using Google to see what a prospective hire has about them on the internet,” says Knowem co-founder, Michael Streko. “It is just too risky to let your name fall into the hands of someone else.”

KnowEm not only monitors to see if your username is available on 120 sites, it also offers a commercial service which will register your brand or username for you. For $64.95 you can secure your identity on over 120 different social media websites. For an additional $9.95 per month, they will also continue to monitor new websites and register your username on them as soon as they launch.

The way I have generated traffic has been a direct result of one of two factors; content which is popular and which people want to read (admittedly, I don’t produce a lot of that), or links from sites which are popular and which are getting a lot of traffic on their own merits.  A couple such projects I’ve recently worked on are Tweet Wasters and Check Usernames, both of which went viral on social media sites and as a result attracted a lot of visitors.

So what good is Google PageRank?  It seems to only serve a purpose as a self-perpetuating myth.  Some SEOs think they need to get links from high PageRank websites, so they come here and comment on my blog posts with a link to their site.  Which in turn drives traffic to my site.  Which is what I want – so did the Google PageRank increase my blog traffic, or did the myth do it?  Some SEOs want to advertise or buy links on high PageRank websites in order to increase their own PageRank, so they come to a blog this and ask to buy links.  So did Google PageRank just make me money?  It would if I sold links, but I clearly do not, otherwise you’d see some banners or even some Google AdSense on here.

So the myth continues – even though Google PageRank doesn’t really mean anything, as long as people think it does it will continue to generate traffic and income.  So should I educate everyone with blog posts like this, or should I just let the traffic and money come rolling in?  Please answer by leaving a comment, and in the process you’ll give yourself a PageRank 5 backlink – which is why you came here in the first place, wasn’t it?