Affiliates hijacking Merchants twitter accounts

Should Merchants and Brand owners be concerned that affiliates could “Brandjack” their twitter accounts? If you don’t know what I mean let me rewind a little… The whole twitter explosion over the past few months has been an interesting one to watch if you’re a spectator but even better if like me you’ve been a twit member for a while and have been happily tweeting away.

For a short period of time you couldn’t even pick up the morning paper without reading about fake celeb twitter accounts being setup and imposters being ousted. In some instances, like the Ryanair case this led to abusive messages towards their customers being published. You can imagine how that went down with joe public. So this got me thinking… should merchants be concerned with affiliates “brandjacking” twitter accounts?

So what do I mean by this? Well if an affiliate were to set up a twitter account on the back of a merchant’s trademarked brand name (for example twitter.com/houseoffraser) and then build up a sizable following, they would have rightly or wrongly amassed an audience to which they can pass themselves off as a spokesperson for the popular high street store.

Now let’s take this one step further, what if they then started to push out inaccurate brand messages or deals and offers that don’t exist in order to drop cookies? I’m sure you can see how the real merchant would have a major issues with this.

I guess the solution/question here is how does a brand validate themselves as the legitimate account on twitter, or any social networking platform for that matter? If this all sounds like I’m getting ahead of myself and that this is something that’s not already going to happen then think again.

There are of course other affiliates who have seized twitter by the proverbial wings and have come up with all sorts of interesting ways to integrate the service with their own websites. Likewise, there are some merchants such as the fantastic @firebox whose twitter account serves as a mixture of quirky product tweets, links to random and interesting websites and good old fashioned constomer interaction.

Back on topic though, will we soon see merchants adding social networking restrictions to their programme terms and conditions in the same way they restrict brand activity on paid search?

Thanks