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Spend 30 minutes to protect your online brand

Published by Christian | Filed under Social Media

Even if you aren’t planning on expanding your current online marketing plan to include social media, if you’re a big brand or in charge of a big brand’s marketing offline or online, you should really take 30 minutes to protect that brand’s online social media identity.

Make it a late Friday afternoon project to take thirty minutes to start registering  your brand’s name at various social media outlets.  Here’s a short list to get you started:

That’s only eight to get you started.  Even if you’re not planning on using those social media outlets, register your brand as the display name / user name so no one else can.  This makes it so an impostor can’t register it and start making false claims as an authority of that brand or straight-up slandering your brand, tarnishing its image online.

Here are some examples of well-known brands not spending 30 minutes to register their brand name:

Not planning on using social media as an online marketing tool?  No problem!  Just register the name so no one else can.

November 17th, 2008


5 Responses to “Spend 30 minutes to protect your online brand”

  1. Kristina Says:
    November 17th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    That’s interesting. Besides registering brand names on some of those sites I would also recommend registering important staff member’s names and perhaps products of your company.

    To add to the 8, I’d also recommend http://www.aboutus.org and http://www.mywot.com.

  2. Christian Says:
    November 18th, 2008 at 9:00 am

    Hi Kristina,

    Good point (re: employee names). That’s definitely a good idea.

    Also, forgot about you guys upstairs :) AboutUs.org is an easy tool to protect your brand as well.

  3. Chris Slowik Says:
    November 25th, 2008 at 2:48 pm

    Christian- This is interesting because it reminds me of the beginning of the dot-com’s when people were registering company names that they weren’t affiliated with so they could sell it when the company wanted it. Now, the same thing is happening with social media sites. Is it possible for companies to reclaim their name on these sites?

  4. Christian Says:
    November 26th, 2008 at 11:03 am

    You know, Chris, I don’t know of any surefire ways. I suppose a representative of the company can email whoever owns the username and see if they would possibly allow them to take ownership of the username (with maybe some bribing of course :)).

  5. Amplify Interactive 2008 Year End Update | Search Engine Marketing... Amplified Says:
    January 4th, 2009 at 3:18 pm

    [...] Spend 30 minutes to protect your online brand (also the most popular post of the quarter!) [...]

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