Un-brandjack your brand on Twitter

There has been a lot of talk about brandjacking on Twitter lately. Some of it is really interesting to follow as many companies seem not to care. If you are a company that cares however, and your brand feels important to you, and you are desparate, because your brand is jacked and you really want to tweet. What should you do?

Stay calm. Dr Jesper is here to help. I have done this and this works. This is the “How to Un-brandjack your brand on Twitter”.

How to un-brandjack your brand on Twitter

Step 1 – Your brand is really jacked
First of all you should look at yourself and figure out whether or not your Twitter brand is really brandjacked. If you are going to just republish your newsfeed onto Twitter, then maybe your company name and news is a better brand for you on Twitter. A good example of this was the CNNbrk twitter user that published the breaking news stories from CNN.

Remember, you will not get enthusiast followers if your name does not give them a promise of what kind of tweets they will receive from your user. If you tell them, and they still follow you, then they really want what you can offer.

So, first of all think about what you’re going to use your brand account for. If your brand news account is not taken, then take it and all is good. Secondly, it might be your news and articles allready feeding on the account. Maybe someone loves your brand and want to do the job for you. If this is the case, you should not try to get the account back, you should reward the person for their persistance and free work.

Step 2 – Make contact with the jacker
You should make contact with the brandjacker. Do not!!! and I repeat DO NOT send your lawyers to go Copyright them. This will give them a huge reason for a Digg campaign and a BIG retweet campaign. Nothing is better for linkbaits than corporate lawyers. We have plenty of examples about this and you don’t want the search engine result pages to be messy aswell.

So, this is what you do. If they have a website on the presentation and that website is not yours. Try to find out who it is on the website and call them or e-mail them pleading to please get your account back.

If they reply – YES – here you go -> then problem solved.

If they reply – NO – we own you BITCH -> then you have a problem.

If the reply – NO – PAY US -> then they have broken the Twitter account policies and you can rightfully get your account back.

Step 3 – Make contact with Twitter
The correct e-mail address to use is: suspended@twitter.com Why? Well basically it is because you’ll reach the right people. They handle the spam and suspended accounts. They can suspend accounts and take them out of use right away.

Explain your situation. If the user has called you a BITCH, you actually do not have a case and you’ll have to plea and beg to get your account back. Actually works if you’re good enough and have good enough reason to get the account. If the account is suspended due to “suspicious activity”, then you just have to tell Twitter about this. If someone is trying to charge you or blackmail you, then this also constitutes a situation where Twitter will suspend the account when you can show them proof and give you the account back.

What you write in your e-mail to Twitter should be REALLY to the point. They recieve tousands of e-mails and if you want to get your point across and your account back. PLEASE keep to the point. Hire a copy if you’re not a good e-mail writer.

ENCLOSE the full url to the jacked account.

Step 4 – Account transfer
Now all you have to do is to wait untill Twitter tells you that you can create an account with an official e-mail address -> containing the domain of the account-name you want. Ie. if you want to un-brandjack the account http://twitter.com/somedomain you need to register an account with the e-mailaddress that ends with @somedomain.com.

You can register any kind of account. http://twitter.com/Iwantmyaccountback would be funny. But any account name works.

Twitter will then close down the brandjacked account and point it towards your newly created account.

Step 5 – DO NOT REPLY
Do not reply or try to contact Twitter again to say thank you. That will only take up time from them. Instead, write a blog post about your new and wonderful Twitter-account and link to your own Twitter account instead. This will increase the visibility of Twitter as well as give your account a boost in the search engines.

It is not more difficult than that.

Any questions?

For further reading – Help from Twitter