I read about a new product today from a company I never heard about. They are called CitizenHawk. (http://www.citizenhawk.com/brand-protection.aspx) I have never used or tested their product so this blog is not any sort of endorsement. I am writing about them as they have some interesting promises that they make.

The press announcement I read said that they have “launched a social media monitoring tool… its new tool allows companies to monitor what people are saying about them and their brands, on popular social networking sites. Cost of the new tool was not announced.” For some of us, especially those with a retail or consumer brand I would think this could be important. I suppose it is probably also valuable for business to business brands.

Some of the brand monitoring they do can be freely done I would think by Google Alerts. (http://www.google.com/alerts) Google Alerts lets you put terms into a recurring search engine query. I do this for Alvaka, NetPlan, NetSecure and some of our other brands. I also do it with the names of my children. Each day I get an e-mail with any new occurrence of these terms on-line and I am provided with a link to the page. It is a great way to monitor what is going on with your brands. What exactly you don’t get with Google Alerts vs. CitizenHawk I am not sure.

One thing that CitizenHawk does do that Google Alerts does not is that they can also track logo usage. One of their products claims to be a “tool for determining how a company’s logo and other proprietary images are being used – or misused – on the Internet.” To my knowledge Google Alerts has not provision for monitoring graphics.

A quote from the CitizenHawk CEO is interesting. He wrote, “At CitizenHawk, we believe in making trademark enforcement an actual profit center.”

Again, I make no testimonial or recommendation here, but if your brand and logo protection is important or if it is currently being abused you might want to check these guys out.