You pay if you want your logo on it...

It doesn't really matter where you ask. Wherever you would like your logo to be included - for example at a festival, on a poster or in a TV commercial - the person you talk to will eventually name an amount. A sponsoring contribution, a printing cost support, a material countervalue. In business, this is quite normal.

However, when it comes to logo presence on one's own website, many website operators make an interesting distinction:

• Consideration is expected when dealing with a smaller or regional clientele.
• On the other hand, it is free of charge for globally active customers.

We have done the test with META Inc.

The echonet team noticed a long time ago that we ourselves tended to integrate various logos of other companies on websites for free and without any consideration from them. You are encouraged to do so, there are badges, icons and even "icon requirements" that you supposedly have to follow. Therefore, we wrote a cost estimate and made an offer of 1,200 Euros per year (100 Euros per month) for a 1-year logo presence of the "Facebook" icon on our website to the company META Platforms Inc.

Interestingly, we did not receive any reply to our offer at all, but we checked whether the offer might have ended up in spam - this was not the case.

... and then you also have work to do with it

Even more trouble and work comes to the operators of a website when someone - we won't mention any names - decides to simply change the logo of the platform. Of course, this means that the old logo is actually wrong. What is surprising is how many websites, even months after this change, still advertise a certain platform with a blue bird, which is now called something else and also has a different logo.

Follow us on Google+?

It is also not uncommon to still find web presences where people viewing the web presence are not only asked via free logo graveyard to please leave the website now, but also to switch to a "presence" that does not even exist anymore. The Google+ icon is not a rarity on the net, even though Google+ has actually not been in operation for a second this year either.

Move along, nothing to see here!

Is this the motto of the online presence? "Move along, nothing to see here!" - Because that's the underlying message sent out when a website asks people in front of their computer or smartphone to move away from the website to follow on social media channels.

It's important to you?

One promotes - without consideration, payment or anything else - with a free logo presence a platform on which one's own company is also active. Anyone who assumes that this is a successful model in terms of social media marketing and customer loyalty must at the same time admit that their own website is probably not an offer to this client.

And anyone who believes that people click on these logos to finally discover the company's social media presence on the respective platform simply does not know the actual statistics. All platforms offer - and typically much more user-friendly than their own website - a search function to discover a company on the platform.

It is not a disadvantage to be present on the platforms, it is also not a disadvantage to book 2 billboards for advertising in the neighbourhood of your own business premises. Just please, don't send your customers away from the shop with the advice that they should first look at the billboard in the side alley.

One step towards more independence is to understand and promote your own brand. For this, you don't have to adorn yourself with other logos, which at best should express something like "We are totally modern".