Protecting Your Brand in Social Media
Do you care about your brand online? Have you spent time and money to obtain, or protect, your brand with a branded web presence using a .com extension?
"Well, yeah, duh," you’re probably saying.
Have you gone farther? Registered non-.com domains? Redirected alternate spellings of your brand to the main site?
Many of you are nodding.
Great. Have you done the same on social media?
Now, there are a lot less of you nodding.
For those who are, have you protected your domain name on every social network and social media site with significant traffic? How about the metasocial nets? How about on the emerging mobile social spaces?
Now you’re all looking concerned. And that’s perfectly OK. There’s a lot of social networks and social media out there. Most of those sites will never go anywhere. But some of them will. And protecting your brand names on those sites isn’t all that difficult. It just takes a little time.
But first, let’s start with the gorillas.
Step 1: Make sure you have an official brand presence on the big social sites: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr. Even if you don’t use it. Even if it’s nothing more than a placeholder that says, "Welcome to this brand name’s space. We know there’s not much here yet, but there will be–soon!" This keeps someone from registering your brand names, and signals your intent to be part of the social spaces. And creating your brand presence on these sites is as easy as signing up, creating your page, group, fan page, or channel. No money involved.
"But someone has already registered my brand name on those sites," you say. Welcome to the new domain squatting. We’d suggest contacting the person who registered your brand name and having a chat.
Step 2: Check where your brands are registered—and register them. It’s easy. Use this tool. It will give you a list of dozens of social networking and social media sites. Now, you can register your brand name at any or all of these social networks and social media sites. Note that this site does not include some large second-tier players like Hi5 and Bebo, so you should probably check them out as well. Yes, we know this takes time. But ask yourself: how much is protecting your brand worth?
Step 3: Engage. And no, this doesn’t mean you have to put photos up on Flickr every day, search for friends on MySpace, or blog on Facebook. But if you choose a couple of relevant sites to be your official social media presence, invite some friends to join, and communicate with them in meaningful, relevant ways on a timely basis–say, every week–you may be surprised what might develop.
Happy socializing!
