5 Minutes Mightier - Staking Out Your Territory
June 5th, 2008
Image by *L*u*z*a*
We’re going to be doing a weekly post called “5 Minutes Mightier” that has several easy tips and actionable items you can accomplish in five minutes or less that will help you improve your brand. (If you have any tips, please send them in or write a guest post!)
This week, we want to focus on the basics and help you take some immediate and vital steps to plant your brand’s flag on the various social media services and sites around the web. We highly recommend that you do this as soon as possible to avoid someone else beating you to it.
The basic idea here is to snap up the account names and usernames for your service. Is it absolutely critical? In most cases, no. However, if your name is Jason Stone, it may help your brand to have jasonstone.com, twitter.com/jasonstone, etc.
Domain name - If you don’t own yourname.com, go register it right now. Do not wait, this one is important from a variety of perspectives, especially SEO. If you don’t have a registrar already, use GoDaddy (with a coupon). You don’t need all the extra crap they try and sell you, with the possible exception of private registration. Regardless, just get the domain asap. Bonus: If you have a really unusual last name, you might be able to get your lastname.com.
Twitter - We’re huge fans of twitter here on MightyBrand, and we think that twitter and services like it are going to really change the way people communicate over the next few years. It’s already become a vital branding tool for a lot of folks, so even if you’re not sure you’ll use it, go grab your name, just in case.
Youtube - Yes, the quality sucks, and yes, the popular content is mostly stupid stuff, but Youtube is the undisputed king of video online, with more than a quarter billion users in January 2008 alone (source). If you ever intend to do anything related to video online, it makes sense to grab your Youtube username now.
LinkedIn - LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals that boasts more than 20 million users. You may already have a LinkedIn account, but make sure you grab your public profile URL, like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanwaggoner
Other suggestions: The other accounts you may want to consider nabbing depend on your own needs, the space your brand occupies, etc. Some other suggestions:
If you have other suggestions for must-have sites or services, please post them in the comments. Thanks!
