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Yesterday I posted about a Romanian company, TrustyPig, ripped off a local Des Moines web startup SmartyPig. After that, I made a call to action - for a Social Brand Hijack. It had ten steps - the first being to blog about it. In this post I’ll highlight how your blog post should be structured for the best effect. I’ll assume that your blog already has a basic SEO strategy in place. If you do not, Ask Me how you can do that.

To see how this works, I’ve attached a screenshot of the Google results of my attempt at brand hijack via blogging. Notice I’m #2 behind the target brand when searching on Google less than 24 hours after posting - exactly where I want to be. Also notice the message I’ve attached to the brand. Success.

Brand Hijack - Blogging

Use the brand “TrustyPig” in the title
If you have a proper SEO strategy for your blog nothing will help more than this. In my case my title shows up in three key places. First it is in the URL, Secondly it shows up in the title tag, and third it creates a header tag with the keyword on the post. These are the first three things Google looks at, which makes it very important.

Plant keywords in your post
In our case our keyword is the brand which we’d like to hijack. Litter your posts with mentions of the brand. Instead of using “them”, etc, use “TrustyPig”. Also wrap these keyword mentions in bold and italics. Google is able to pick these out of the content because you have placed emphasis on them.

Use ALT and TITLE Attributes
In my brand hijack post, I used two screenshots from Troy Rutter. In the external links I used our keyword in the TITLE attribute that links to his images and placed our keyword in the ALT attribute of the IMG elements that are showing his images. You should do the same with any images or screenshots you attach - as well as adding the title attribute to every outgoing link you have.

Link, Link, Link
Cross linkage between all of our blog posts will make each more relevant than the other. At the end of your post, add a heading (use a header element with our keyword) “More on TrustyPig” or however you want to word it. Then list all the links using their keyword rich titles (and don’t forget to add the TITLE attribute to your links). Here’s a list of posts to link to.

Social Media
Ask your readers to post this all over the social media landscape to build link love and traffic generation.

DON’T LINK TO THE TARGET
Don’t give the target brand any extra external links. We want to hijack their SEO by increasing ours. Links to their website will only create an external link in Google’s eyes - which is good for the target.

If you have any more questions, leave a comment or check out the html on my brand hijack post

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A brand hijack is an attempt to infuse a message as related to a brand. Often times companies do this internally or accidentally. Sometimes it starts from an external source. Most of the times it is viral. Rarely it is organized. Our goal is to takeover search results and word of mouth for the TrustyPig brand in order to communicate our message to any of TrustyPig’s potential customers.

So this is a call to action - a socially organized brand hijack - against TrustyPig. Why? Identity Theft - TrustyPig stole the online branding of SmartyPig, a Des Moines based web startup whose service is a “social savings bank”. TrustyPig blatantly stole SmartyPig’s Happy Cog designed website - logo and all.

Here are 10 ways for you to participate in our TrustyPig social brand hijack…

1. Blog about it (with “TrustyPig” in the title of the post and DON’T LINK TO THEM)
2. Link to others that blog about it (we’ll keep an updated list of links here)
3. Digg It
4. Discuss on twitter using #hijacktrustypig hashtag
5. Join the FriendFeed discussion
6. Clip on SocialMedian
7. Stumble It
   
8. Save to Delicious and Magnolia
9. Leave comments on blogs with reviews about about TrustyPig
10. Tell people about it

Help spread the message!

Technorati Tags: trustypig, smartypig, brand hijack

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A local Des Moines web startup, SmartyPig, recently had their entire web design ripped off by a Romanian company called TrustyPig that apparently is an “all inclusive traffic and income generating program”.

Here is a screenshot of SmartyPig’s website - the legitimate (and awesome) service…

And here is a screenshot of TrustyPig’s website - the copier

Our local Des Moines entrepreneur community is not happy about it.

SmartyPig had this to offer to its followers on Twitter…

B aware of trustypig.com. We are in NO Way affiliated with this Romanian ad outfit. Not sure what they are up to. But they have good taste.

Michael Ferrari also let his Twitter followers in on the scam:

Yes, a Romanian company [url removed by me] has ripped off @smartypig. Logo, CSS and all. And this is flattery right?

Other Coverage of TrustyPig Ripoff

• Troy Rutter - Romanian Company Rips Off Smartypig.com Design
• JustBrady - TrustyPig.com?

Follow the TrustyPig discussion

Follow the discussion on Twitter using the #hijacktrustypig hashtag

FriendFeed discussion here

Clip it on SocialMedian here

Digg this here.

photos courtesy Troy Rutter

Technorati Tags: trustypig, smartypig, ripoff, #hijacktrustypig

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