Something we've talked about in the past is the idea of brand squatting - opportunists stealing your social network IDs, and either posting away or simply parking them out of your reach.
For example, check out what happened after (London commuter train service) South West Trains left its Twitter ID vacant. Meanwhile this website claims to be selling off Twitter IDs for £20 ($28) a shot.
In fact, according to researchers at Mark Monitor, who have published their Brand Jacking year in review, there are 10,000 incidents a week worldwide. And that's online brand jacking of the good old fashioned kind - someone registers an actual website with your domain name, or one that has a slight misspelling.
Apparently this is often done by using obscure domain names, such as .cm for Cameroon. But the end effect is they show up on search engines. And though there is a way of getting round it, dispute resolution at ICANN (the top Internet domain register) costs around £4,000 ($5500) and takes time.
So should you go through and register every single variation of your domain name, even for very obscure places? If you are a major brand, absolutely yes. In the greater scheme of things it's a relatively small cost compared to protecting your reputation and identity.
If you are a smaller business, then obviously there are cost and time implications but certainly here the major social network IDs should be claimed (use http://www.usernamez.com), as well as your .mp domain as it's currently up for grabs for free. Finally, it's worth looking through domainpigeon to see what is still available.
Related articles by Zemanta- MySpace Announced as Domainmonster.com Premier Partner (techburgh.com)
- Importance Of Domain Name In Web Marketing (adamzaius.net)
- Startups: Domain Names are Gold (startupprofessionals.com)
Link to original postLink to original post
Link to original post