Mumbai: Sleeping on social media mentions? Are you aware of what your audiences are saying? They could be praising you...or tarnishing your reputation. Navigating the digital landscape is like walking on a tight rope, a foot wrong can ruin all your efforts. What has been said about you, who is talking about, what is being said – all these sentiments need to be tracked, monitored for quality, theme and insight to take prompt action.

Let’s explore what it takes to protect your brand in the digital ecosystem and what top brands are doing to protect their brand integrity. 

Need of Social media Monitoring for Brand Protection 

Is your brand safe online? ️

Brands are required to keep a close eye on social media activity as it’s a breeding ground for negativity and you never know how quickly something could escalate and do massive damage to the brand reputation. Here are some key steps that brands should take to protect their brand image.

Automate the process of Spotting brand mentions

Identify both positive and negative sentiments with the automated process and tech to spot brand mentions across the web and social media. This could help to acknowledge the expressions of the customers.

Track online reputation to avert potential crises

Real-time, proactive social media monitoring can help avert a potential crisis. For instance, trending hashtags, people mentioning brands on X, Instagram, and/or Facebook, dissatisfied with some brand activity or product. Brands can reach out to them to clarify their stance or resolve a grievance if they act promptly and monitor brand mentions. This process needs to be automated with real-time alerts and actionable insights.

Brand Infringement Protection

Brands spot brand impersonation using the brand intellectual property to create fake websites, social media handles impersonating brands, fake customer care, job offers, promotional offers, etc. Advanced AI, ML tech, and Open-source intelligence with capabilities like Natural Language Processing and Frame Recognition for identifying images, text, logs, emotions, etc. 

How top brand protecting the reputation with social media monitoring

A major construction firm, who was facing concerns with intellectual property violations, infringement issues & major frauds happening across social media & digital platforms. With the digital landscape being so vast they were not able to track and monitor violations manually.

With AI-ML and OSINT powered tech they were able to automate social media monitoring, and infringement protection. Open-Source Intelligence tech was deployed, scanning both open web across several platforms. Processes were established using ML-based automation for cleaning, tagging & categorizing data collected. ML driven confidence scores were generated for images, videos & texts harvested from OSI. The ones having low ML confidence scores were manually reviewed. Analysis, cases and insights for fake websites, social media handles, misleading posts, negative brand mentions, fake customer care number were identified across social media channel and the web. As a result, between Jan-April across 5 platforms 1,177 cases were detected with 905 successful takedowns with 1-2 days of detection. 

Brand Protection on social media and beyond

One of the largest FMCG brands actively monitors social media for brand mentions, or any fraudulent activity that could damage its brand reputation or dupe its customers. With our social media brand and infringement protection tool, we highlighted the cases of intellectual property infringement, fake social media handles, APK copycat apps, phishing websites, fake posts using brand logo.

Another instance were brands, we audited brand social media and web mention was for a popular motor vehicle brand and found brand infringement where brand site gets clones using brand logos without authorization give attractive offers prompt user to enter personal details which is used for fraudulent purposes. Infringement ads on adult sites when brand ads were shown on adult sites it sullies brand repute. It also shows that affiliates are wrongly targeting the ads but are being paid for it. Fraudulent use of brand keywords affecting brand reputation. The brand ended up paying twice as much for the same activity with increased bidding cost. Fraudulent sites, social media handle posts job offers to attract and defraud interested job seekers. This ends up hurting the brand.

Conclusion

Even a minor lapse on social media can turn into a major catastrophe for brands. Brands need to add automated social media monitoring to act as sword and shield, taking down malicious activities and protection for negative brand mentions and fraudulent acts.  A social media marketing campaign needs to back proactive measures powered with advanced tech to not only protect brand but also ensure trust and transparency.

The author of this article is mFilterIt co-founder & CEO Amit Relan.