Relevant Best Practices – Protecting Your Brand Part 1

Protecting your brand
protects your users, advertisers, personnel, strategic partners, sponsors and
yourself.  If you do not take adequate
steps to protect your brand, others will be able to use it against you. They
may pretend to be you or one of your moderators, counterfeit pages, goods,
points, cheats and coding schemes will be promoted and attributed to you, your
founder(s), senior executives and spokespeople will be harassed, trolled or
have their identities stolen or manipulated online, and your brand will be
diluted.  

Avoiding confusion about your
messaging, branding, the authority of third parties and protecting your
reputation are paramount.  You will be
quickly blamed if someone poses as you.  Nasty rumors will be more credible if posted
online, using one of your brands. Furthermore, small news stories can become
big ones if you are not watching what others are saying about you and being
responsive to inquiries in the right way.

Identifying and Policing Your Brand Agents:

Your logos and your brand
names define you online.  You have to
control their use, make it clear when someone is authorized to use your brand
or logo and in what capacity and watch what others are saying about you. There
are several choices you have to make, some are easy while others involve
extensive analysis on costs of design and implementation, maintenance and how
those choices affect your growth, your reputation and your users.

Your Official Brand Agents:

Your spokespeople, customer
service staff and your moderators are your outward facing official brand agents
online.  They must be authenticated (so
you know who they are), easily identified by your users and protected from
others posing as them (whether they are trying to be helpful or hurtful). 

There are typically two major
roles played by personnel engaged by the company to handle interactions with
users. One relates to business functions while the other relates to community
policing functions. In smaller and start-up networks, the roles may be combined
in the handful of customer service/moderation personnel they engage. 

In larger
networks, many of which outsource at least a portion of their customer
service/moderation needs, companies use different terms to define those acting
in online customer support and site moderation. These typically include titles such
as “customer service representatives,” “monitors” and “moderators.” Sometimes,
when large groups of customer service/moderation staff are engaged, the
supervisors or escalation personnel are identified as “Super Mods” or “Team
Leaders.”

Many companies engaged in
ecommerce as well as community networks define “customer service
representatives” as those who address lost passwords, online orders and shipping,
warranty inquiries, etc. They reserve the term “moderators” for those who
police the networks for terms of service violations and respond to abuse
reports by users. This can often be helpful, as different skills may be
required for different roles. In an online gaming environment, moderators are
gamers and can address inquiries relating to the game itself. They may not
understand shipping methods or costs or confirm credit card details. Volunteers
who are experienced users can sometimes fulfill the moderator roles (subject to
stringent risk management guidelines, see Parry's “Working with Volunteers”) but would
never be used to process payments or handle ecommerce complaints.

Call center providers can
often handle the customer service roles cost effectively, but would not be able
to police the network for lewd language, terms of service violations or
cybercriminal behavior. Your customer service staff needs are easy to spot,
since users will quickly complain if on hold for too long or they find your
customer service staff to be unresponsive. They “vote” with their dollars. 

You
may find an increase in charge-backs, cancelled and un-renewed accounts and
customer complaints. There are many professionals who advise on ratio of
customer service personnel to purchasers, the best hours to deploy larger
groups of personnel and technology tools designed to delivered customer service
support more efficiently.
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