Today, #blur is trending on Twitter. The 90’s band will receive the 2012 BRIT award for Outstanding Contribution to Music and the Twitter congratulations are pouring in. That means that our Tweets, which contain #blur as a matter of course, are read by more people than usual today. The hashtag overlap was a coincidence, but it made us think about Twitter and branding.

We didn’t steal Blur’s hashtag, we just happen to a share a name with the band. Unfortunately, real hashtag hijacking happens quite frequently. A company can create a hashtag, but they can’t control how it’s used. This makes it harder to manage brand identity. Qantas ran into this problem last month with a Twitter competition called #qantasluxury. The airline was going through a period of bad PR after grounding their entire fleet following strikes. They ran a competition asking Twitter followers to nominate their favourite thing on a luxury flight, to win a pair of pajamas and a first-class amenity kit. Instead, users tweeted their Qantas complaints, like “Qantas Luxury means sipping champagne on your corporate jet while grounding the entire airline, country, customers & staff.” The promotional hashtag became a platform for dissent, and Qantas couldn’t do a thing about it.

It’s almost impossible to legally regulate Twitter. You can sue a particular user for a Tweet, as Jon Krawczynski found out. But many Twitter users are anonymous and can be widely heard, making it easy to break gagging orders. In Britain it’s possible to take out a so-called super-injunction, which makes mentioning a particular topic, or the injunction itself, illegal. In May, Ryan Giggs took out a super-injunction about an extra-marital affair with Imogen Thomas. Twitter users named and shamed him, followed by MP John Hemming who pointed out “With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter it’s obviously impractical to imprison them all.” Giggs then unsuccessfully tried to sue Twitter. Twitter rendered an expensive super-injunction obsolete – a fascinating example of how it’s reshaping our legal landscape.

It will be interesting to see whether the law will shift to incorporate Twitter, like it did domain names. In 1995 America passed the AntiCybersquatting Consumer Protection Act to prevent unscrupulous characters from pre-emptively buying the domain names of famous people or companies with the intent of exploiting them or selling them at inflated prices. There’s also a policy called UNRP to regulate domain names and arbitrate disputes. These legal structures were created out of a need for regulation. Right now, there aren’t any such protections on Twitter – but for how long? In the meantime, you can get a sizzling Twitter campaign next week if you brief the Exchange today.