I just finished a post (norwegian) about the fact that we registered the name of our Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation tech blog “NRKbeta” on a lot of social networks and places around the web. We did that the second we decided on that name for the blog. And I think that is becoming an important part of your marketing strategy.
I try to be pretty fast on registering “eirikso” on the different services popping up around the net. You never know who’s gonna strike big, and right now it is quite nice that addresses like youtube.com/eirikso, twitter.com/eirikso and flickr.com/photos/eirikso takes you to stuff that I am in control of. Eirikso is my brand on the internet. If you try the same with NRKbeta we’re there as well.
So let’s do a quick test. If you happen to make very nice sports cars you might want someone that visit youtube.com/porsche to find something else? And Microsoft on Flickr? Probably not extremely important, but as big web sites become huge services and places where we spend a lot of time this is getting important. The second race for domain names. At this point http://youtube.com/…whatever company… isn’t close to the importance of http://www…whatever company… but it is getting more important as these giants grow.
And, if you decide to go out there and register your company just to reserve the space, then please put something honest in there. Register at twitter and simply post one single update. “Company nn has registered this user. It’s currently not in use.” or something like that.
My former place of work, the american consulting company called Accenture seems to have done something like that: twitter.com/accenture. Or have they? I don’t know if this is Accenture or just some dude that has registered that user. And that last twit is just plain stupid. You’ll never get any feedback by simply registering a user on twitter and start screaming “anybody out there?”. And my guess is that some clever people at Accenture have registered this one as well. And they don’t have to use it. But at least put in one video and a quick message. Same as for twitter. “This is the official YouTube channel for Accenture. It’s currently not in use.”
And please. Don’t bring back that horrible “under construction”-gif from the late nineties! Register to reserve the space. If you’re going to use it, do it properly, if not be honest and tell people it’s not in use.
Do you have any nice examples of profiles that should have featured something else? Like Porsche on YouTube?
eirikso 
I think you’ve made a very interesting point there on educating companies that it’s already time to move on more than just the domain. The ad agency I work with recently setup a channel on youtube and we will soon be uploading all the TV commercials which we produce as an agency. It’s going to be a good showcase of our work and also helps people talk about our work and for us to get opinions from the viewers in an open forum. If you’ve read the recent post on twitter’s blog on how effective a certain company has made it’s customer relationship thanks to twitter. Can’t recollect the name there.
Yes, there are a lot of ways to use these new platforms and channels. Just when companies started getting a grip around this new world wide web-thing, a lot of new stuff shows up. 🙂
“Do you have any nice examples of profiles that should have featured something else?”
How about twitter.com/nrk..? 🙂
Also I wish Mozilla had taken twitter.com/mozilla and /firefox, and that Canonical had taken /ubuntu. Oh, and NRKbeta should take nrkbeta.ipernity.com before I do it! 😛
But this post gave me inspiration to actually do _something_ with my Virb profile, instead of just leaving it blank like it’s been for so long now. I guess I should register at youtube too, even though I don’t want to use it (as I’m sure you’re aware by now :)), just to hold onto the nick. Although my nick is not one that is very likely to be used by anyone else, methinks.
“twitter.com/nrk”. Hehe. When setting up youtube.com/nrk we actually had to pay a couple of dollars for that user. 🙂
And yeah. “Forteller” at YouTube… Never.
I got a tip off regarding an add-on for Firefox called Piclens. It is quite a good way to navigate true big picture libraries such as flickr.com. Launch Piclens via the blue play-button on the flickr.com site and search for e.g eirikso and a nice wall of your photos will emerge.
One of my coworkers have been talking about this for a while as well. And even written about it over at our company geek-blog (in Norwegian):
http://nrkbeta.no/du-trenger-piclens/
Seems like I need to test this one now…