I don’t know how fruitful the term “brandjacking” is in this case — which is why I didn’t use it in either post. Both of the Twitter accounts in question said nothing but good things about the respective companies, and for better or worse no company copletely “owns” its brand.

I’m prone to call it “brandhacking” — with white- and black-hat equivalents, just like computer hacking.

Is it brandjacking if the person proves to be 1) internal, and 2) motivated by the desire to move AA into social media?

I think we’re going to see a lot of the following scenario: Company X has no clue about social media. A junior person at Company X decides “I have to bring this brand into the 21st century, but something new like this will never get approved. So I’ll start tweeting/networking/whatever under the company’s name, and if it proves successful I’ll use that to justify launching a formal program.” They start tweeting and it hits the PR/blogosphere that “hey, Company X is on Twitter!” Company X’s PR folks deny any involvement, and the Twitterverse concludes that Company X was brandjacked. Which maybe it was – semantics – but it’s more the PR equivalent of a skunkworks project without formal approvals at the top. Happens all the time in engineering.

The Hoover’s tweeter started in similar fashion six months ago, actually – just an experiment without any authorization. Rob L secured ‘@hoovers’ as a handle and asked if I wanted to use it, so I tweeted a bit to test the waters. The fact that Guy Kawasaki was following us served as enough justification when it came to the president’s attention (he’s a fan of Guy’s work). So he allowed it to continue, and @zackgonzales now represents for the Hoov.