No Twitter Brand? Fail Whale For You
Posted by George Pasley on August 4, 2008
Twitter has been getting a lot of press lately. As more and more people hear about it, they tend to drift between what Morriss Partee calls the 4 Phases of Twitter.
One side effect is that as Twitter gains in popularity, Twitter names are being snatched up. Have you secured your brand on Twitter? There have already been instances of people posing as employees of big companies and famous people. One example is Exxon Mobil. Another is marketing guru Seth Godin.
By at least reserving your company and/or product name, you can preserve how your brand is perceived on the web. Even if you don’t see the significance of Twitter, it only takes about 2 minutes to sign up and it’s free. As an example, my employer obtained www.firstfederal.com about 10 years ago. Do you know how many First Federal banks there are in the United States? Chances are you know of one within 100 miles of you and it has nothing to do with us.
Now, your name may not be as generic as ours, but it’s just as important that you act sooner rather than later. Banks and credit unions are already being regularly discussed on Twitter. By reserving your brand, you can at least be somewhat ready when your name starts flying around the Twitterverse. Oh, and twitter.com/firstfederal has already been taken.
Click here to view a list of companies that are already on Twitter.
Image by Yiying Lu
Jared said
I definitely worked quickly to secure a Twitter account for College of Charleston, knowing that we want full control over the brand. We lost out on the “cofc” username on YouTube, so we had to settle for “collegeofcharleston” instead. It’s a race, that’s for sure.