How Singapore businesses can nail their brands' worth online – Part One

What is the online value of your business? This is the most relevant question to any business big or small, now that we are in this mobile Internet day and age. Once upon a time during the dotcom boom, ground businesses may have envied online companies in their attainment of rapid fame and fortune. As the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, failed dotcoms scrambled to sell scraps of what they were worth online, to the bemusement of bricks and mortar.

Noteworthy was the value of their businesses that remained before they were sold off. These valuations were the results of the quantifying of each business’s tangible and intangible assets including online and offline brand reputation, potential for growth and remaining goodwill that they had at that time with their stakeholders.

For local businesses here in Singapore, moving your business online between then and now was and still is an inevitable and essential move that you know would increase the value of your business. Value that you could only qualify with adjectives: customers who want to know more about your business run a search online and find your online presence “insightful”, “informative” and “exciting”; the higher you place on search results, the more “established” your company is; the more number of likes that you receive through social media tells everyone that you are more “popular”, “experienced” and “reliable”.

Your business welcomes all the good valuations locally, regionally, even globally, but now you are caught in a catch-22 situation: you want to increase the value of your business, yet the more valuable your business is, the higher the possibility of ill meaning attention rushing in to diminish its value.

What are the threats facing your online presence?
Business owners in Singapore do take note: You have worked very hard to build up value and differentiate your business from others. Naturally you do not wish for the value of your businesses to be easily diluted or easily shared with profiteering entities. Yet, there are many ways in which your brand may be compromised and every day, tactics are evolved to try to catch unsuspecting businesses off-guard.

• Cybersquatting – Cybersquatters register domain names that contain marks of famous brands with hopes of selling them to the original companies at much higher prices than what they paid for. Visit these websites: www.singaporeairlines.sg (singaporeairlines.com), www.ocbcbank.com (ocbc.com) and www.capland.com (capitaland.com)

• Typosquatting – Typosquatters register mistypes of your brand name with various domain extensions such as www.osin.com (osim.com), www.breatalk.com (breadtalk.com), www.creatif.com (creative.com), www.tigerpalm.com (tigerbalm.com) and commonly operate them as phishing sites. Pepsico is one company highly aware of typosquats and registered www.pep.si for themselves.

• Domain name scams – an email made to look as though it came from a legitimate company shocks you into registering domain names with them and you pay but do not get anything registered

In fact, if you perform an online search of your brand name and product names in as many different permutations as you can think of, you will probably see them popping up on sites that are not owned by you. Some of these could be websites of genuine businesses that may or may not be involved in the same trade as yours.

In these cases, you generally will not expect to own these domain addresses. Take McDelivery for example. It was found that Mcdelivery.com was registered in the year 2000 by registrant Mc Parcel Delivery, a courier service operating in the State of Washington, USA. Even if this domain name would have been an ideal match to McDonald’s famous fast food delivery service that first succeeded in Singapore in 2005, the chance of a successful domain recovery effort from McDonald’s would have been nil had it tried.

Back to your online investigation of who (other than yourself) uses your brand name. You may have come across websites that have ill meaning intentions towards your business. Tapping on the popularity and awareness of your brand, these sites divert some of your traffic away to them; create a sense of falsehood about your reputation or phish for information from your audience.

Worse, those sites may harm your brand, your product or your customers. These online threats are very real, detrimental to your reputation and have the effect of eroding the value of your brand. Most recently on 24 July 2013 and 30 July 2013, DBS Bank released statements that their Internet banking site was being compromised.

Five websites that were identified to be purely phishing sites were set up by perpetrators with the sole intention of obtaining the login information and passwords of unsuspecting DBS Internet banking users. To the untrained eye, these sites looked frighteningly identical to DBS’s Internet banking landing page. These sites have since been removed.

How do you overcome these threats and increase the value of your brand online?
Building up the value of your brand requires both advancement and defense, online and offline. A modern day Sun Tzu would have said the same. As your business pushes forth in groundwork with R&D, product research, product refinement, marketing efforts, promotions; supported with extensive training and great customer service, you defend with patent applications, copyrighting, trademark registrations, active market research, communications and online security.

You want to gain as much ground as possible and grow your share of the pie. You do not wish to be impeded, at least not in the wake of your stride. You must build a strong defense to cover your tracks or ideally, even before you have begun your moves.

At this point, you want to rely on trusted service providers whom you have worked with or have heard of. Service providers who are marketing or branding professionals; companies who designed or hosted your websites or provided you with email hosting services; facilitators who built your IT infrastructure or wired you up for business; providers of your POS (point-of-sale) systems; even law firms who offered you sound legal advice.

Speak to these professionals about securing or increasing the value of your brand online. They want your business to grow and to grow securely as much as you do.

With their help, explore how to increase consumers’ trust in your e-commerce sites and how to make their shopping experience fluid yet secure; how to minimize and monitor the possibility of external threats in every shape and form; what to do to ensure that you never spam your genuine customers or deny them access to you; how to ensure that your brand is protected before anyone infringes upon it; how to mark your territory on a large scale and how to plant your brands in place before anyone else.

Register your trademark with IPOS (Intellectual Property Office of Singapore) so that your mark gains a statutory monopoly that you may use in online and offline protection of your brand.

Ask the right questions, formulate the appropriate plans and execute them before you tap into a new market and before your new products ply through their respective markets. Stay a step ahead of perpetrators and protect the value of your brand and business.

Coming up in the next article, find out what the next BIG thing on the Internet is and how it affects you as a business owner. This article is first in a series of three to help inform local businesses of current and upcoming challenges on the Internet.

Access IPOS https://www.ipos.gov.sg/

View attacks to DBS’s IB security https://www.dbs.com/security/Pages/security-alerts-news.aspx