Is There Anybody Out There (With Your Name)?

One of the down sides of social media is that there are basically no rules. If you set up a Facebook page, all you have to do is check a box saying you represent who you say you are and you're good to go. Kind of frightening.

I am in the process right now of helping a local non-profit retrieve their name on Facebook from someone who set up a page representing them with an official logo, address, and everything. Kind of frustrating.

Last summer when we went to set up our Facebook page, we found there was already one out there with thousands of fans. No name in the profile, but our website address, our logo. The problem was one of their profile pics was that standard you see around all the time with a little 5-year old boy in one of our football jerseys giving the camera the finger. OK for fans, maybe, but not for a page pretending to be us. Through a long journey (which included trying to find an email address for Facebook help), I finally got the other page taken down so we could have the name.

My boss loves college baseball. He takes his family on a trip to Omaha every year--it's their vacation. So right now, he is in his glory. He follows the games on his phone when he isn't in front of a TV.

He was at a fundraiser over the weekend while one of the games was on so he was following one of the school's Twitter feeds on the game. At least he thought it was a school feed. The name insinuated it was a school feed.

As the game got intense, so did the tweets. The tweeter was criticizing coaches, ranting on the school when all of a sudden, there was a four-letter word that begins with an "f" in capital letters. The first thing my boss thought was, "uh-oh."

He thought the poster was a school employee because the athletic department logo was used on the Twitter feed's home page. BTW--At the very least, this would be a logo violation unless the school gave permission for someone to use it on a personal Twitter feed, which I doubt.

After we talked about it for a while we came to the conclusion that it is virtually impossible to follow up on all the rogue social media out there using logos, official website addresses and the like. But, I am wondering if we should do a search on Twitter and Facebook every once in a while just to see what's out there. If the school's logos or official contact information is being used, should you contact the administrator and ask them to change it?

Earlier in the year, I found a page on Facebook for our track and field program that wasn't run by our coaches. I asked the coaches to find out who was running it and have them put up a disclaimer that it wasn't us. The person was more than happy to cooperate and never meant to misrepresent their page. Sometime it's just as easy as contacting them and asking them to remove logos or put up a disclaimer.

Anybody out there had any experience with this? What would you do if you found a social media site pretending to be you?