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To help small businesses protect their brand assets against squatters and hijackers in the social media space, Trademarkia, a legal search engines, announced the launch of its social brand management tools designed to help enable small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) to manage and defend their brand identities across more than 500 social networks.
Trademarkia’s social management tools provide a free brand username search and alert for small businesses whenever their brand names are misused by another party. To help brand owners stop brand theft on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, eBay and YouTube, Trademarkia users can also request Cease and Desist letters to be issued to the offending party through attorneys in the Trademarkia network for $185. In addition to monitoring and protecting their brand, businesses can pay $29 per month for the company to keep their social media stream active by regularly posting tweets, blogs and Facebook status updates on their behalf.
“We’re delighted to bring new functionality to the Web that uniquely addresses the needs and concerns of small business owners worldwide in their quest to increase revenue through a higher level of social media engagement with their customers,” said Raj Abhyanker, CEO of Trademarkia. “Effective brand management is important for any size business, and this new service brings big-brand capabilities to small businesses across the country.
The site also publishes publicly available government trademark registration data, and unlike the U.S. government’s Patent and Trademark Office database, makes it accessible and searchable by name, keyword, category and more. The site lists more than 6.5 million records for both active and “dead,” or out of service, trademarks dating back to 1870. Brand owners can also use Trademarkia to file their own trademark application in 55 countries simultaneously.
Brand hijacking, squatting and theft are major problems in the realm of social media, especially for small businesses that often lack the resources to claim and monitor their brand identities across the scores of sites on the Web. Because most social networks do little to ensure that the registrar of each user name is a legitimate representative of that brand, this exposes the real brand owners to incredible risk of severe damage to their reputation and the loss of their customer base.
“Before Trademarkia, companies would have to employ market researchers or attorneys to track and register trademark filings-an expensive proposition, even for larger companies,” Abhyanker said. “Trademarkia makes that process so much easier and much more affordable, allowing any size business to protect their most valuable asset-their brand.”