Earlier this evening, I caught wind of a promotion Baja Fresh was running via their Facebook Page: a free burrito with the purchase of a soft drink. Since there's a restaurant close to my house, I decided to jump to what I assumed would be Baja Fresh’s Facebook Page (facebook.com/bajafresh) and print out the coupon.
Much to my surprise, that URL does not belong to the Mexican casual dining chain, but to one Helen Scott of Miami, Florida. Figuring out the actual URL of Baja Fresh’s page was as simple as a Google search, but it did lead me to question how exactly Facebook plans to handle the situation, and similar ones that are likely to emerge in the wake of Facebook rolling out custom URLs to everyone – both regular users and brands – over the past month or so.
A Facebook spokesperson got back to me, informing me that they “can strip the name from a user if the trademarked entity is requesting it. We would then reassign it to the rightful entity.” In other words, even if a trademarked brand failed to pre-register their name prior to the custom URL rollout, they’ll still be able to get their name from a user that has beaten them to it, provided they have the proper credentials. This is certainly the right policy for Facebook to be following, though it will surely upset those that were able to secure clever albeit trademarked usernames.