The Power of the Social Media Space

What Brands Need to Consider about Usernames

Executive Summary

There are currently over 450 social media platforms and the list is growing. With such a rapidly expanding market, brands must consider how they fit into the social media sphere. Most will discover that they would benefit from either active participation or a passive monitoring presence. Brands that choose to be in social media must develop a clear strategy that takes full advantage of the opportunities that the social space presents, while avoiding the pitfalls of a social media presence that is poorly executed. No matter how actively a company participates in this space, however, it is always important to secure names that could be used to protect or promote its brands. With this Perspectives, FairWinds examines the opportunities and challenges that brands face while setting up real estate in the social media space.

Foreword

The fascination with the social media scene continues as businesses marvel at the interactive power of a medium that takes on many different forms including forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating, posting, chatting, messaging, and bookmarking.

Every month, Facebook has roughly 3 billion visitors, Twitter has 200 million and LinkedIn has 70 million. For brands, this exposure can equate to millions of views that could, with the right strategy, translate into advertising revenue, sales, brand loyalty and reputational benefits.

With these kinds of numbers, failing to at least secure usernames in social media sites simply is not an option—the question is, how does a company work to develop a clear social media strategy? For FairWinds, the connection between domain names and usernames is clear—they are both critical digital assets that protect and promote a company’s initiatives online. Domain names are easy to remember alphanumeric strings that allow Internet users to navigate the Internet to find the Web sites of their favorite brands. Usernames function in much the same way. Internet users navigate social spaces by searching for or directly entering the usernames of their favorite brands, names of individuals they are looking for, or keywords for conversations about topics that interest them. Just as domain names provide trustworthy addresses for relevant, desired content to customers, usernames provide the same in the social media space. Domain names and social media spaces require separate and distinct name ownership strategies. Both types of strategies should look to optimize online traffic by capitalizing on the way Internet users seek content:

• Promotion: Just as brands look to promote themselves through intuitive domain names that “direct navigators” are likely to type into their browser address bars, brands need to be visible in social media where social networkers are likely to look for them by controlling and using the most intuitive account usernames and handles. Similarly, consistent construction needs to be used for the different types of profile and program pages that brand owners deploy. For example, there should be consistency in the naming convention employed for corporate pages, customer service pages and marketing program pages.
  
  
• Protection: Just as brand owners look to protect their brands against cybersquatters looking to register infringing domain names that are likely to receive type-in traffic, brand owners should look to protect their brands against usersquatters looking to register infringing account usernames and handles that are likely to be visited by potential consumers either by accident or intuition.

If used properly, social media sites offer rewards. If social media sites are used poorly or ignored, companies risk being subjected to brand bashing and negative comments that can be broadcast far and wide to millions in every country in the world. To get a sense of how the biggest brands are currently trying to make good use of social media usernames, FairWinds examined the presence of the top five companies on Interbrand’s Best Global Brands list—Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft, General Electric and Nokia.

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