Do you have a personal brand? If so, awesome. In today’s day and age, whether you’re an influencer or a business person, having your personal brand is the wave of the future. But have you protected your personal brand? Because if not, it’s hard for you to grow your business and your putting your brand at risk.
As a social media attorney and influencer lawyer, I’m here to teach you today about how you can protect your personal brand. Let’s start with why your personal brand is important and why you should protect it.
Let’s think about some big companies out there like Nike. Nike sells sneakers, tee shirts, basketballs, a whole bunch of different things. And what separates Nike sneakers and basketballs from, I don’t know, Dick’s Sporting Good brand sneakers and basketballs, is their brand. When you see Nike’s next to somebody else, you know the level of quality that you get with Nike. And Nike has spent millions of dollars in growing and protecting their brand over time. And it’s so important that they do so.
But if you are an influencer, a YouTuber, a public figure, or a content creator, then you are your brand. We call that a personal brand. And if you’re going to spend time, money, energy, and effort going out there and building a brand around yourself, you better protect it too. Now, unlike Nike, you don’t need to spend millions of dollars in doing so, but there are some incredible best practices that you need to know in order to build and protect your personal brand. Because if at the end of the day, you are your brand, you better make sure that you are protected.
Let’s talk about a few different things that you could do to protect your personal brand. One is creating a company. Two is getting your personal brand trademarked. Three is protecting your creative assets, like photos and videos, with a copyright, and four through contract law.
Let’s first start by creating a company. Why would you want to do that, right? You’re thinking to yourself, “Ethan if I went and started selling, I don’t know, banana muffins out of a shop downtown, yeah, I’m going to create a business like an LLC or a corporation because it’s a real business. But do I need to do that if I’m an influencer or a content creator or have my own personal brand?” The answer is yes. Why? The point of creating a company is to insulate yourself from liability, meaning … let’s go back to that muffin shop, for example. Let’s say somebody chokes a muffin or gets sick from a banana that went bad in your muffin. They’re going to want to sue you. But if you have a company that is created for that muffin shop, then they can only go after the assets of the muffin shop itself, not your personal assets.
But if the muffin shop owner didn’t create a company and they get sued, the person who got harmed by eating that bad banana muffin can sue you personally and go after your car, your home, your assets, and even your banana muffins and no one wants that. So creating a company is a great idea for anyone that’s running a business. And the same thing is for your personal brand.
If you’re an influencer or a content creator and you are out there making money on your social media profile on your content and a deal goes bad … maybe you, I don’t know, didn’t promote somebody brand correctly or maybe your content happened to “borrow” a clip from someone else’s content, and they sued you for intellectual property infringement. You could be held personally responsible. And just like that banana muffin shop owner, they can come after your assets, but not if you create a company.
Creating a company helps to shield you from personal liability for the actions taken in connection with your personal brand. And so it’s a great idea if you have a personal brand to create your company. And it’s cheap and easy to do. Let’s say you’re in Florida, for example. It will cost you like $300 or less to file for a limited liability company where you are the sole owner and you could do it online in about an hour. You want The Social Media Law Firm to help you? We charge less than $500 bucks to set everything up for your company and make sure that it’s done right through our startup legal services. So, creating a company for your personal brand is the first thing that you can do to protect yourself.
The second thing that you can do is trademark your personal brand.
Let’s say your personal brand’s name is, I don’t know, Ethan Wall. Boy, I kind of just made that one up. And I’m an influencer and that’s my brand. I want to make sure that I protect that brand so that someone else doesn’t start using my name in connection with my business. But let’s say that I also don’t use my personal name. My personal brand is called, I don’t know, the Social Media Superstar. I wouldn’t use that because that’s kind of lame, and if you do have a handle the Social Media Superstar… it’s great. I love it. You’re doing awesome. *awkward pause*
But seriously if I use that as my Instagram handle or let’s say my blog, – like a blog called Social Media Superstar – and that’s where I promote products, services, or serve maybe as a brand ambassador for people on my blog, I want to protect it. And you can protect it by filing for a trademark.
A trademark is any name, logo or tagline that identifies your business separate from everybody else’s. So if I’m selling muffins at a muffin shop and I’m, I don’t know, Social Media Superstar, using that terrible example again … I should have prepared better for this, I could file a trademark for selling banana muffins under the name of Social Media Superstar so that somebody else can’t open up a shop either across the street or all the way across the country using a similar sounding name or a logo that looks like mine. And I could be the only one who can profit off of that name. And that’s great because I want to build my brand.
So, if you have a personal brand or a blog, for example, you can file for trademark protection as well and you can show people that you were using the Social Media Superstar in connection with your blog and you could be the only person in the world to protect it. This is a big deal, especially if you’re a content creator or an influencer.
We have worked with so many wonderful clients who are influencers who, for example, started with a blog. We protected their blog with a trademark and later on down the line, somebody wanted to collaborate with them and create their own clothing line or use their name in connection with an ad campaign or a product or service, and they had to come back to my clients and get permission and a license to use their name in return for paying our clients a whole bunch of money. But our clients wouldn’t have been in that position had they not trademarked their personal brand. So it’s so incredibly important to trademark your name, your logo, your taglines. That’s going to help to protect your personal brand and it’s going to stop somebody else from coming in there and taking your brand or using a similar name or logo.
The third thing that you need to do to protect your personal brand is protect your stuff. If you have a website, a blog, photos or videos, there’s literally nothing stopping someone online from stealing your stuff and selling it as their own. Whether it’s copying the look of your website, copying your blog posts, taking your photos and using it in connection with their brand, taking your videos and using it to promote their products and services – people are stealing content left and right. If someone is stealing your stuff, that sucks, but you also have a very difficult time stopping people because the internet is so amorphous. People are kind of hiding in the dark web, stealing people’s stuff left and right, saying, “You can’t see me,” like John Cena. But you don’t want to be in that situation.
You’re building your personal brand. Your content is king, and you want to be sure that you protect your content and you can do so with a copyright. You could copyright your website, your photos, your videos, and even your blog posts. By copyrighting your personal brand’s work and filing it with the US copyright office, you can stop other people from stealing your stuff.
And if they do steal your stuff, you can send them a cease and desist letter demanding money in return in addition to stop using your stuff, or they can get sued for copyright infringement. So it’s such a wonderful idea to protect your stuff via copyright. Now you’re thinking to yourself, “Ethan, I Googled this online and I know that I have copyright protection the moment that I create something.” And you’re right, but your copyright protection is limited, meaning if you were to send someone a cease and desist letter or put a take-down notice to a social media website because someone else is stealing your stuff, the website may not take it down unless you have filed for a copyright.
Or if you serve a cease and desist letter, someone’s going to say, “Look, you don’t have a copyright filed with the US Copyright Office so you can’t sue me on the one hand until you do. And also, you’ve got to prove that I made money or you lost money. So, go fly a kite and spend thousands of dollars on filing a lawsuit.” And they’d technically be right. But if you copyrighted your stuff first, then someone knows they’re going to have to settle this case and pay you damages for stealing your stuff because now they know they’re going to lose in court as you are entitled to sue them and receive specific money damages by law if your copyright was registered. So, copyrighting your stuff is a third thing that you can do to protect your personal brand.
The last thing to make sure that your personal brand is protected is to have the right contracts on your side or an attorney who is looking out for your best interest in reviewing those contracts to make sure you are protected.
Look, big brands have big, expensive lawyers. Who is looking out for you? If you were going to collaborate with a brand and make social media content for them, you want to make sure that you’re getting a good deal, that you’re protected, and while you never want to over-lawyer something to where it interferes with the deal, you also don’t want to be taken advantage of. You don’t want to be put in a position where someone is not paying you for the work. You don’t want to be put in a position where someone takes your content or uses your name inappropriately. So how do you protect yourself? You do that through a startup lawyer. By having an attorney in your corner who’s going to advocate on your behalf, look out for your best interests, and review or draft contracts, they will protect you with your brand in mind.
Those are the four different ways that you can protect your brand. Creating a company, getting a trademark, copyrighting and protecting your stuff, and having the right contracts and attorney in your quarter. I hope this blog gave you some great tips on how you can protect your brand.
If you have some questions about how to protect your personal brand or maybe what I mean by filing a trademark, for example, I’d love to hear from you. Reach out anytime. And if you need help protecting your personal brand, whether it’s through creating a company, trademarks, copyrights, drafting or reviewing contracts, or just need some legal advice, I would love to hear from you. I’m Ethan Wall, social media and influencer attorney. Now go out there and grow and protect your personal brand.
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