Spend 30 minutes to protect your online brand
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:
- This isn’t Sears
- Someone selling Twitter.com/BurgerKing
- The Price Isn’t Right
- Largest video game store in NA not taking advantage
- Of all brands, you think Geico would wise up..
Not planning on using social media as an online marketing tool? No problem! Just register the name so no one else can.
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.
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.
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?
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
).
There are certain services actually which offers ID Protection by registering a company to multiple sites. I don’t see any point of registering everywhere. Those you mentioned here seems enough to me.